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THE MAN FORBID 

AND OTHER ESSAYS 



BY 

JOHN DAVIDSON 



WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY 

EDWARD J. O'BRIEN 



M 



BOSTON 

THE BALL PUBLISHING CO. 

1910 






INTRODUCTION 

Copyright 1910, by 
THE BALL PUBLISHING COMPANY 



@CU'3653 15 



CONTENTS 

FACE 

Introduction 7 

The Man Forbid 21 

Pre-Shakespearianism 33 

Banderole's Esthetic Bill ... 41 

On Writing a Causerie 55 

The Criticism of Poetry . , . . 65 

Tete-a-Tete 75 

A Spirit 89 

Tete-a-Tete 99 

A Would-be Londoner 109 

The Art of Poetry 125 

Thoughts on Irony 133 

George Meredith's Odes . . . .139 
Evolution in Literature . . . .151 

Tete-a-Tete 155 

Poetry and Criticism 163 

Tete-a-Tete 169 

Tete-a-Tete 183 

Chanctonbury Ring 195 

By-Ways 207 

Prose Eclogue 219 

On Interviewing 231 

On the Downs 247 



INTRODUCTION 

JOHN DAVIDSON has given notable 
work to his generation as a poet^ as a 
novelist^ as an essayist_, and as a critic. All 
his literary work comprehends a philosophy 
of life, and whether or not this philosophy 
be original or echoed, true or false, the fact 
remains that it has had a strongly marked, 
though not always clearly recognised, influ- 
ence on English letters. If his views of life 
seem merely the result of mental indigestion 
brought on by an overdose of Nietszche, it 
is likewise true that his forceful expression 
gave to these views a more serious hearing 
by a larger audience than had hitherto been 
granted to most English followers of the 
Apostle of the Uehermensch, 

By reason of his doctrines, the facts of 
his life are interesting, if only for the light 
they shed on the pathetic though not uncom- 
mon contrast between this man's dream and 

7 



8 INTRODUCTION 

his deed. For like many more before him he 
glimpsed the Grail, but only through a mist 
of error which he lacked the will to disperse. 
Yet inasmuch as he followed the quest long 
and faithfully, ere he succumbed to the 
final weakness, the chronicle of his days is 
ennobling, and though simple as far as out- 
ward happenings were concerned, shows much 
complexity in the literary product. 

John Davidson was born at Barrhead, in 
Renfrewshire, Scotland, on the eleventh of 
April, 1857- His father, the Reverend Alex- 
ander Davidson, was a minister of the 
Evangelical Union. The boy's training was 
hardly academic in the true sense of the 
word, and was limited to what he was inclined 
to gather in The Highlanders* Academy in 
Greenock, where he acted as a sort of pupil- 
teacher, and in the course of a single session 
at the University of Edinburgh. Leaving 
college in 1877, he wrote his first play, now 
known as " An Unhistorical Pastoral," which, 
however, was not published until over ten 
years later. As a boy he had worked as an 
assistant in a chemical laboratory in Green- 
ock, and later as assistant to the Town Analyst, 



INTRODUCTION 9 

and the training which this occupation gave 
him was utilised to no little advantage in later 
days when he sought for an apt simile to 
convey his meaning. Upon leaving the Uni- 
versity, he took refuge in teaching, and be- 
tween 1877 and 1889 he gave instruction in 
numerous private and charity schools, devot- 
ing his leisure to poetic and dramatic compo- 
sition. In 1890, he came up to London, and 
eked out a scanty subsistence by writing ar- 
ticles and reviews for the Glasgow Herald 
and the Speaker, until his poetry began to 
attract the attention of the literary public. 
For the next few years his career was that of 
the successful journalist who elevated his 
craft by the sheer energy of his effort to a 
position where it might probably be called 
inspired. The irony of his life was this. 
Potentially capable of leadership, he bowed 
to public opinion and followed the line of 
least resistance. The immediate success was 
possibly greater; the ultimate painful out- 
come is unhappily well-known to everyone. 
In the latter part of April, 1909, he suddenly 
disappeared, leaving behind him manuscripts 
which clearly revealed a suicidal purpose. 



10 INTRODUCTION 

Several months later his body was discov- 
ered, and to-day the world mourns him as a 
talented genius whose will-power succumbed 
to despair. 

To turn from John Davidson's life to his 
work is as if the reader's mind were suddenly 
to be plunged into an over-stimulating cur- 
rent of mental activity. The effect is pleas- 
ant, but it is a shock. No matter what the 
form of Davidson's expression may be, 
whether it be prose or poetry, essay or drama, 
we are brought face to face with a strongly 
combative intellect which does violence to 
our beliefs, and half convinces us by sheer 
force of epigram and paradox. What more 
shocking mental stimulant can be found than 
such an interrogation as this, which stands 
all by itself in " A Rosary." " Is not hope 
only a more subtle form of despair ? " These 
arresting questions, or statements such as this, 
** Dignity is impudence," are invariably 
novel, and their appeal to the reader's intel- 
lectual pride is so subtly calculated as to take 
by storm the position which a more suave and 
ordered argument would leave intact. By 
reason of this and other characteristics, John 



INTRODUCTION 11 

Davidson has succeeded in founding a school 
in contemporary English composition which 
may be briefly characterised as the apotheosis 
of journalism^ and whose chief exponent to- 
day is Mr. Gilbert Chesterton. Even the cas- 
ual reader will observe far more than a super- 
ficial resemblance,, for example, between 
" The Napoleon of Notting Hill " or " The 
Club of Queer Trades/' and John Davidson's 
less familiar, though by no means inferior, - / 
novels, " Perfervid " and " The Good Men." 
Nor is this resemblance confined to fiction. I 
think there is a very marked similarity in 
thought-processes, to say the least, between 
the critical essays of John Davidson, as they 
appeared week after week in the columns of 
** The Speaker," and the causeries and re- 
views by Gilbert Chesterton which appeared 
not long afterward in the same critical jour- 
nal. 

This type of creative work is neither 
healthy nor healthful. Think of Dr. John- 
son turned Pierrot, and the reductio ad ab- 
surdum is complete and immediate. The 
pose is delightful, — indeed it is almost fully 
justified, — but it lacks enthusiasm. It is 



12 . INTRODUCTION 

not fresh and natural: it is forced and arti- 
ficial. It takes different forms, you may say. 
True: but whether your would-be Dr. John- 
son is a follower of Davidson or a follower 
of his master Nietszche^ the net result is the 
same. For the external is all that is copied: 
the red blood of enthusiasm, though not the 
counterfeit fluid of force, is almost completely 
lost. The absurd public antics of Gerard 
de Nerval and other French symbolists, which 
Symons relates, and Gilbert Chesterton jump- 
ing in and out of hansom cabs, as related by 
himself, seem equally artificial. The truth of 
the matter is that the fin-de-siecle pose is be- 
ginning to seem old-fashioned, and that this 
reaction from it is in danger of going to even 
more violent extremes. For this reason, it is 
important to know just what John Davidson, 
who holds the balance between the two, really 
stands for. If he had been the strong man, 
like Dr. Johnson, the study of his work would 
have been more valuable. As it is, he is the 
sole bridge that we have between the period 
of the malade imaginaire, and the Kipling 
period that followed. The two periods may 



INTRODUCTION 13 

seem identical in point of date, but the fact 
remains, I think, that the so-called fin-de- 
siecle era was experienced long before it was 
expressed, and that England suffered less 
from it than any other nation. 

The contemporary man who is potentially 
strong but vacillatingly weak, if he have an 
original mind and a magnetic personality, is 
bound to suffer much in the conflict. To him 
both sides appear to have much of truth, and 
in endeavoring to live his life, he is torn be- 
tween two ideals seemingly wide apart as the 
poles, — the one apparently symbolising 
death, and the other life. The suffering is 
born of delusion, for as a matter of fact, the 
two are one, and both are evil, since spiritual 
death for itself and bodily life and progress 
for itself are one and indivisible and false. 
Villiers de I'lsle Adam, the typical symbolist, 
informed his countrymen that his continued 
existence reminded him of the bored playgoer 
in the front seat of a proscenium box who sat 
through the play only out of courtesy for 
the feelings of his neighbors. Kipling, on 
the other hand, preaches the gospel of the 



14 INTRODUCTION 

body. You cannot be an animal and live only 
out of politeness. It is a contradiction in 
terms. 

Davidson sought the magnificent vision, 
and found it neither in Symons nor in Kip- 
ling. Being a child of his century, he turned 
to Nietszche. Though he repudiated evolu- 
tion, and wrote a novel to attack its absurdi- 
ties, as another has done after him, he found 
relief and inspiration for his thought and 
expression in the cymbals and sunrises of 
Zarathustra. Here, at last, he breathed a 
clearer, brighter air. In " Sentences and 
Paragraphs " he had written as follows : — 

" The chief hindrances in the consideration 
of any matter are the thoughts of others. It 
is not so much a test of genius to think 
originally, as to know what one actually does 
think. Some men upon most subjects have 
two judgments: a public one for daily use, 
and a private one which they deceive them- 
selves into the belief they never held. There 
are decent, honest men who opine the opin- 
ions of others, jDcrsuaded that they are their 
own; few indeed can detach their proper 
thought from the mass of ideas.** 



INTRODUCTION 15 

Realising this truth then, he turned, as I 
said, to Nietszche. He was fortunately too 
clear-sighted to follow his master absolutely. 
As the ostrich buries its head in the sand, so 
Nietszche buries his nose in the upper air, 
and refuses to look at the slime in which his 
feet are dabbling, conscious only of a pleas- 
ant, titillating coolness. Let us be primitive, 
but let our minds be clear, says Davidson, 
and he looks at the misery beneath him, and 
forgets the blue sky above. Both are wrong, 
but both mean well, for Nietszche and David- 
son are alike striving. Both endeavour to 
pull the human race up with them, but David- 
son is content to lift them, earth and all, to 
his own level, while Nietszche pulls men up 
by the roots, and pelts them at the stars for 
playthings. Davidson plays with his and 
other men's souls: with Nietszche mankind, 
including himself, is only a toy for the firma- 
ment. 

I have emphasised this distinction so 
strongly for a special purpose, wishing to 
bring out the fact that Davidson was in no 
sense an imitator. He saw his own individ- 
ual vision, and if it was an Inferno, so much 



16 INTRODUCTION 

the greater was his courage in voicing it. He 
saw it in terms of poetry, and he expressed 
it nobly, for the sense of beauty was ever 
uppermost. He had the lyric mind, and it 
was his misfortune to be a Scotsman. Meta- 
physic has killed more minds than it has ever 
cured, and the Scotsman is ever prone to dis- 
putation. That is one reason why Dr. John- 
son detested Scotsmen. He considered them 
too individualistic. That is the reason why 
Scotsmen, apart from the immortal Boswell 
who was surely no true Scot, detest Dr. John- 
son, and why John Davidson detested the 
literary and ethical standards of his day. 
For this reason, and this reason only, he pre- 
cipitated a strong reaction in poetry and 
prose, which, together with the anvil-blows 
of a young Indian journalist, saved English 
literature from being annexed to France. 

Is it not well to sound a note of warning? 
The intellectual earth nowadays is flat, and 
contemporary England, in running away 
from a monster that is dead, may fall over 
the bounding precipice of the land of com- 
mon-sense. Shaw and Chesterton are a por- 
tent. Their method is defensible: their con- 



INTRODUCTION 17 

viction seems open to question. Yet their 
influence is great^ — almost overmastering. 
John Bull would do well to look to his other 
island before it is too late, for there, and 
there only, lies the fresh spirit of romantic 
beauty which can save English letters from 
itself. 

The present collection of essays may be 
looked upon as a sequel to " Sentences and 
Paragraphs." Gathered in the same man- 
ner, from the dusty files of a forgotten peri- 
odical, they have their significance as an 
emphatic statement of some of John David- 
son's most individual and stimulating views. 
This interest should have been suflicient to 
have ensured their preservation, and it is the 
editor's excuse, if such be necessary, for his 
undertaking. 

Edward J. O'Brien. 

January 24th, 1910. 



THE MAN FORBID 



THE MAN FORBID 

THE long undulating seaward slope 
of the cliffless Downs is always, in 
clear weather, an unsatisfying prospect. 
The face of the Downs, starved, discon- 
tented, and unkempt, lowers gloomily on 
the sea under rain ; in the sunshine, a pale, 
bleak radiance plays over it, as of a land 
hoping against hope. The cliffless Downs, 
that is. Where the white escarpment tow- 
ers along the beach, the seaboard has a 
different personality ; more engaging con- 
tours, greener turf, a lofty attitude, a 
splendid place immediately surmounting 
the tides. The precipice gives strength 
and dignity ; the slow, serpentine declivity 
creeping to an undistinguished shore is 
as dispiriting as a string of blind beg- 
gars. But in the evening the low-lying 

21 



22 THE MAN FORBID 

Downs seem to rise from their supine pos- 
ture ; cloaked in the dusk they beckon and 
whisper, and you go to meet them again. 
Strange sounds, strange beings appear 
upon the Downs in the gloaming, if you 
have the ears to hear, the sight to see. 
There and then the Itinerant met the Her- 
mit, The Man Forbid, who neither hopes 
nor fears, nor hates nor loves. Where he 
lives none can tell. Sometimes he haunts 
the desert, sometimes the snow-clad moun- 
tains. The Itinerant met him on the 
Downs. The day had been dull and wet, 
but towards sunset the clouds broke up a 
little and the rain ceased. Above the sea, 
slanting like a ledge of dark jade, hung 
a purple haze rimming the horizon. Above 
the haze disordered brands smouldered 
darkly. The depth and intensity of the 
crimson fire filled and possessed the mind; 
it was difficult to see the overhanging leaden 
cloud, or to note the golden background 
of the fire, the fainter yellow, the pale 
green. Away from the west, cross-hatched 



THE MAN FORBID 23 

vapour flushed rosy red and quickly faded 
into pencil marks. Behind Cissbury Ring 
an immense rampart of steel-blue cloud 
rose menacingly. In the north the shadow 
of night already loomed. As the Itinerant 
watched the passage of time from the 
verge of Erringham Valley, a hand was laid 
on his shoulder, and a face peered into 
his, the face of The Man Forbid. 

" I know who you are," said the Itin- 
erant at once. " What do you want with 
me ? " 

" I come to warn you ! " 

" To warn me.^ " 

" Yes. That is my only touch with hu- 
manity : I would have others avoid my 
fate." 

" What is your fate.? " 

" I shall tell you. I became so close a 
comrade of the day and the night and the 
time of the year, so submissive a lover and 
student of men and women, that I forgot 
all I had ever learnt from books. Then it 
seemed to me that I stood erect for the 



24 THE MAN FORBID 

first time ; and I looked with compassion 
on the multitude beside me, bent double 
under toppling libraries. I noted that the 
heavier his load of libraries, and the more 
prone his attitude, the happier the porter 
seemed to be. I saw vast hordes of peo- 
ple engaged in tilling the soil, and in many 
other occupations, the majority of whom, 
w^henever they could snatch an interval of 
leisure, spent it in grovelling under heavy 
burdens of printed matter, which, if they 
had none of their own, they would beg, 
borrow, or steal. ' Good people,' I cried 
earnestly, ' throw off your burdens and 
stand erect. Few are they who are helped 
by books.' " 

" I agree with you there," said the Itin- 
erant ; " I have never learnt anything from 
books. One only gets out of books what 
one brings to them : that is to say, litera- 
ture, so far as it affects the individual, 
Is only a confirmation of his experience." 

The Man Forbid resumed his discourse 
without heeding the Itinerant's interrup- 



THE MAN FORBID 25 

tion. " ' Few are they who are helped by 
books. Will you die, then, crushed under 
libraries? The printing-press works with- 
out ceasing ; already your spines are curved 
by the weight of the literature of thirty cen- 
turies. Throw it all off ; stand up ; and see 
the world for yourselves — ^ day and night, 
and life and death. Do not think the 
things someone has said of these ; but keep 
watching them, and you will become excel- 
lent, for we are what we contemplate ! ' 
But they mocked me and told me the story 
of the fox who lost his tail. I replied with 
the story of the monkey, who also lost 
his tail — in order to become a man ! I 
said to them, ' Break with the past. All 
that men have imagined, thought and 
felt — art, philosophy, and religion ; all 
that is only a spiritual tail which must be 
got rid of if your souls are to develop.' 
But they laughed me to scorn and pelted 
me away with pamphlets and tomes. Then 
I ceased to concern myself with the world 
of men, and fixed my mind on Nature. 



26 THE MAN FORBID 

Darkness and light, colour and sound, and 
life and death filled me with their unsay- 
able meaning. Again I turned to my 
brethren, straining under piled-up libraries. 
I could not refrain from the attempt to 
express my thought. Not being a musi- 
cian I was unfortunately unable to employ 
pure sound. Language, so much more 
dense a medium than music, refracted my 
meaning sadly, although I chose my words 
well. Nevertheless some of the book-por- 
ters seemed to understand my songs, and 
for a short season pronounced them beau- 
tiful and true. Only for a time, however ; 
because their minds were so preoccupied 
with the load of libraries that they quickly 
tired of anything else ; and once more re- 
sented bitterly the suggestion that they 
were wasting their time and strength in 
supporting the accumulated thought of 
thirty centuries. There was no harbour 
for me among men. I left them, and grad- 
ually man and his fate became indifferent 
to me. Then also Nature, day and night. 



THE MAN FORBID 27 

and life and death, ceased to interest me — 
me, a feeble inhabitant of one of the most 
insignificant spheres among myriads of 
myriads that roll in space. The whole 
substantial universe, systems and suns, and 
life conscious and unconscious, appeared 
to me only the momentary and impertinent 
irruption of a shining, sounding spectre 
into the empty, dark, and silent infinite. 
And all this — nay, I shall leave you with a 
smile — all this because I had cut my spir- 
itual tail off^. The orang-outang, I sup- 
pose, sat his tail off in the course of many 
centuries. At any rate, you will not make 
a monkey human by caudatomy. Nor will 
you make men divine by cutting them off 
at the root. It was a false analogy, that 
of the tail. Man grows out of the past ; 
his tap-roots descend, drawing nourishment 
from every stratum, and are warmed by the 
central fire. The scission of the smallest 
rootlet will hurt his growth. It is not un- 
derground that he must tend his develop- 
ment, but in the sunlight, and with the 



28 THE MAN FORBID 

winds and the dew. I have warned jou. 
Mj heart is a husk ; my brain a mere mir- 
ror. Men shrink from me. I am indiffer- 
ent, and feel neither joy nor grief; but 
since men loathe me, I know that they 
would not be as I am. You keep too much 
alone; you wander about on the Downs. 
Day and night, life and death, engage your 
thought, enthral your fancy. The ideas 
with which men have filled and adorned 
their environment, the ideas which they per- 
ceive to be there, are distasteful to you. 
You would break entirely with the past. 
But I warn you, I warn you. Resort to 
the knife, and you will find that it is not 
an unbecoming and useless tail you sever 
with manful stroke, but spiritual suicide 
that you commit." 

The Man Forbid vanished as suddenly as 
he came ; and the Itinerant pulled himself 
together. Had he thought of using the 
knife? He would consider the matter in 
his study. Meantime night was thronging 
into the sky. Behind him the Downs had 



THE MAN FORBID 29 

receded and sunk low. Beneath, the Nor- 
man tower stood up shadowy, a ghostly 
dead grey against the darkening sea. The 
blue slate roofs, the red tiles, the red and 
yellow chimneys of the town, appeared 
and disappeared in the gloaming, dim 
flashes of colour among the black groups 
of leafless trees in the churchyard and the 
gardens. The soft white plume of a train, 
with ruddy under-feathers glowing in the 
furnace fire, wheeled through the swarthy 
branches. Two lamps were lit in a narrow 
back street. Not a breath of wind stirred. 
The sunset, burning slowly, smouldered out 
above the sea ; and the opposing lamps, 
golden-hued, took heart in the night. The 
smoke from a thousand fires curled into the 
air; good people were at supper; and the 
sound of a song rose faintly. 



PRE-SHAKESPEARIANISM 



PRE-SHAKESPEARIANISM 

NOW is " a voice of wailing heard and 
loud lament " ; our young men see 
visions and dream dreams. All the woe of 
the world is to be uttered at last. Poetry 
has been democratised. Nothing could 
prevent that. The songs are of the high- 
ways and the by-ways. The city slums 
and the deserted villages are haunted by 
sorrowful figures, men of power and endur- 
ance, feeding their melancholy not with 
heroic fable, the beauty of the moon, and 
the studious cloisters, but with the actual 
sight of the misery in which so many mil- 
lions live. To this mood the vaunted 
sweetness and light of the ineffective apostle 
of culture are like a faded rose in a char- 
nel-house, a flash of moonshine on the Dead 
Sea. It is not now to the light that " the 

33 



34> THE MAN FORBID 

passionate heart of the poet " will turn. 
In vain the old man cried : — 

Authors — essayist, atheist, novelist, realist, 

rhymester, play your part, 
Paint the mortal shame of nature with the 

living hues of art. 
Rip your brothers' vices open, strip your own 

foul passions bare; 
Down with Reticence, down with Reverence 

— forward — naked — let them stare. 

This ironical Balaam-curse has become a 
message. It must all out. The poet is 
in the street, the hospital. He intends the 
world to know that it is out of joint. He 
will not let it alone. With whatever 
trumpet or jew's-harp he can command he 
will clang and buzz at its ear, disturbing 
its sleep, its pleasures ; discoursing of dark- 
ness and of the terror that walks by night. 
" Down with Reticence " — that kills the 
patient ; " down with Reverence " — for 
whatever has become abominable. Do they 
delight in this ? No ; it is only that it is 



PRE-SHAKESPEARIANISM 35 

inevitable. Democracy is here; and we 
have to go through with it. 

The newspaper is one of the most potent 
factors in moulding the character of con- 
temporary poetry. Perhaps it was first of 
all the newspaper that couched the eyes 
of poetry. Burns's eyes were open. 
Blake's also for a time; and Wordsworth 
had profound insight into the true char- 
acter of man and of the world ; but all the 
rest saw men as trees walking; Tennyson 
and Browning are Shakespearian. The 
prismatic cloud that Shakespeare hung out 
between poets and the world ! It was the 
newspapers, I think, that brought us round 
to what may be called an order of Pre- 
Shakespearianism. It was out of the news- 
papers that Thomas Hood got " The Song 
of the Shirt " — in its place the most im- 
portant English poem of the nineteenth 
century ; the " woman in unwomanly rags 
plying her needle and thread " is the type 
of the world's misery. " The Song of the 
Shirt " is the most terrible poem in the 



S6 THE MAN FORBID 

English language. Only a high heart and 
strong brain broken on the wheel of life, 
but master of its own pain and anguish, 
able to jest in the jaws of death, could 
have sung this song, of which every single 
stanza wrings the heart. Poetry passed by 
on the other side. It could not endure the 
woman in unwomanly rags. It hid its head 
like the fabled ostrich in some sand-bed of 
Arthurian legend, or took shelter in the 
paradoxical optimism of " The Ring and 
the Book." It is true William Morris 
stood by her when the priest and the Levite 
passed by. He stood by her side, he helped 
her; but he hardly saw her, nor could he 
show her as she is. " Mother and Son," his 
greatest poem, and a very great poem, is 
a vision of a deserted Titaness in London 
streets ; there was a veil also between him 
and the world, although in another sense, 
with his elemental Sigurds, he is the truest 
of all Pre-Shakespearians. But the woman 
in unwomanly rags, and all the insanity and 
iniquity of which she is the type, will now 



PRE-SHAKESPEARIANISAI 37 

be sung. Poetry will concern itself with 
her and hers for some time to come. The 
offal of the world is being said in statistics, 
in prose fiction: it is besides going to be 
sung. James Thomson sang it ; and others 
are doing so. Will it be of any avail .^ We 
cannot tell. Nothing that has been done 
avails. Poor-laws, charity organisations, 
dexterously hold the wound open, or ten- 
derly and hopelessly skin over the cancer. 
But there it is in the streets, the hospitals, 
the poor-houses, the prisons ; it is a flood 
that surges about our feet, it rises breast- 
high. And it will be sung in all keys and 
voices. Poetry has other functions, other 
aims ; but this also has become its province. 



BANDEROLE'S AESTHETIC BILL 



BANDEROLE'S ESTHETIC BILL 



4 4xroU'RE gloomy, Banderole." 
X "I always am in March." 
" How's that? " 

" Because in March I mourn for my 
Esthetic Bill." 

"Your Esthetic Bill?" 
" Yes, have you never heard of it ? " 
" Never. Tell me about it. Banderole." 
"Shall I? Well, I suppose I may. But 
I must premise. Look at me, Magsworth. 
If you were to characterise me, you would 
say that I am a man of a passable appear- 
ance, with — ah — a certain undignified 
frankness — shall we call it ? — and a 
pleasant voice. Come, now, we've known 
each other for about a week ; and that's 
your opinion, isn't it? Well-spoken, well- 
looking, carelessly frank — and shrewd 
withal? " 

41 



42 THE MAN FORBID 

" Yes ; I may think that you are per- 
haps a httle partial to yourself; but that's 
about my opinion." 

'' Quite so. That is the opinion I have 
of myself; that is the opinion all my new 
acquaintances form of me ; but it is not the 
opinion of my old friends ; and in six 
months it will cease to be yours if you 
continue knowing me." 

" I shall continue knowing you if for 
no other reason than to test the truth of 
what you say." 

" Very well. It was not until I was 
forty that I discovered what my intimates 
thought of me. Until my fortieth year, 
the good-natured, undemonstrative defer- 
ence with which those who knew me best 
treated me appeared to me a tribute to my 
shrewdness. I use the word ' shrewdness ' 
now ; six years ago I should have employed 
some such phrase as ' great talents,' ' in- 
disputable capacity,' or ' remarkable 
gifts ' ; but I have had a lesson." 

" Lessons are learnt occasionally even in 



BANDEROLE'S ESTHETIC BILL 43 

these days, when people are afraid to 
acknowledge that they were ever taken 
in — even by themselves." 

" Quite true. One day, a apropos of 
something I had said, an acquaintance ex- 
claimed, ' You can't mean that ! It's not 
in keeping w^ith the transparent simplicity 
of your character.' I forget what it w^as I 
had said, but that remark about myself was 
a revelation to me. I went home with it, 
and sat down and thought it out. Clearly 
my intimates considered me a merely in- 
genuous person ; brusque people took the 
edge off their manners in dealing with me, 
not because they feared me, but because 
they looked upon me as a child; and the 
wind was tempered for me generally. It 
was a painful process, I can tell you, hav- 
ing my eyes couched of the self-complacent 
belief that others thought me a thorough 
man of the world. Then for awhile I liked 
my being misunderstood. To have the rep- 
utation of a simpleton and to be a Machi- 
avelli is to enjoy a position of great 



44 THE MAN FORBID 

power; and I went about for weeks rev- 
elling in 'a perfect analysis of the motives 
of all my acquaintances — I saw how they 
wanted to protect me, to aid me, to save 
me; I had only to ask for a thing to have 
it ; everybody wished to be able to say, 
' I, too, did something for that dear fel- 
low Banderole.' I tired of that, however, 
and determined at last to appear in my 
true colours ; but it was a most hopeless 
undertaking." 

" It has been said that there is nothing 
more difficult to live down than a good 
reputation." 

" And well said ; I found it so. When 
I did anything in the role of Machiavelli, 
people took it as a joke, and it was decided 
that my simplicity of character grew daily 
more transparent. It was to no purpose 
that I said the bitterest things about all 
my friends ; they simply quoted them to 
each other as Banderole's latest, and agreed 
that none but a man of the most ingenuous 
nature could have detected and character- 



BANDEROLE'S ESTHETIC BILL 45 

ised their faults and foibles so unerringly. 
I despaired of ever appearing as I really, 
am in the ordinary walks of life; so after 
much cogitation I hit upon a distinctly 
original idea. Did you ever have a dis- 
tinctly original idea.? " 

" I'm not sure." 

" Well, if you ever have one, you will 
enjoy- it, at first; and then you will be in 
an agony till you make up your mind 
what to do with it. One's first penny in 
one's first breeches' pocket is an icicle com- 
pared to one's first original idea. There 
are so many things you can do with an 
original idea. You may exemplify it in 
your life — " 

" And get run in." 

" You may put it into a magazine ar- 
ticle — " 

" And be snubbed for a plagiarist. You 
may imbed it in a play, or bury it in three 
volumes ; you may paint it, or carve it, or 
sing it ; and nobody will look at it or listen 
to it." 



46 THE MAN FORBID 

" You understand the matter. But if 
you put it into a Bill and get it passed, 
why, there you are for ever and ever with 
the British Constitution. So I drew up a 
Bill incorporating my original idea. By 
that Bill I expected at one stride to step 
upon a pedestal and exhibit once for all 
that breadth and subtlety which, as long as 
I was only one man more in the street, 
escaped the observation of even those who 
knew me best." 

"But you were never in Parliament?" 

" No ; but the Marquis of WagstafF's 
son promised to get his father to introduce 
the Bill into the House of Lords. You 
see, it was really a sort of sumptuary Bill, 
and the Lords was the proper place for 
it, I was told. I called it a ' Bill for the 
Beautifying of Britain,' or, briefly, an 
' ^Esthetic Bill.' " 

" Umph ! Go on ! " 

" The Bill arranged for externals only." 
. " Right. If the outside of the platter be 



BANDEROLE'S ESTHETIC BILL 47 

clean, it follows that the inside will also 
be clean." 

" I am glad you think so. It was my 
opinion. I have found that the best shops 
make the finest show, in spite of proverbs 
to the contrary. I made no attempt to be 
comprehensive, believing that, if in one or 
two vast concerns an aesthetic reformation 
were effected, the details would practically 
work out themselves. I began with rail- 
ways. My Bill provided that railways 
should be bordered all their length by gar- 
dens, and so become, as it were, rivers of 
flowers flowing across and along the whole 
land. The lines themselves were to be 
made of steel, damascened with arabesques 
in brass and silver. The stations were all 
to be castles, kiosks, pavilions, with draw- 
ing-rooms, dining-rooms, smoking-rooms, 
upholstered artistically. I worked out a 
new type of carriage superior to anything 
that has ever been seen before ; and I in- 
troduced a clause requiring all electricians, 



48 THE MAN FORBID 

under a heavy penalty, to labour at the de- 
velopment of electro-motion. I made it 
penal to advertise in railway stations ; but 
that was covered by a general clause for- 
bidding all mural and open-air advertise- 
ment. It seems to be so simple. Stop 
advertising, and nobody would be a penny 
the worse. On the contrary, a great many 
people would be infinitely better in temper 
and digestion, for you would reduce meas- 
urably the worry of competition." 

" And what about those whose occupa- 
tions would be gone — advertising agents 
and bill-stickers .f^ " 

" My dear Magsworth, my JEsthetic 
Bill provided occupation for more people 
than are ever likely to want work. Con- 
sider the immense army of gardeners re- 
quired for the railway borders, of skilled 
craftsmen to keep my damascened lines in 
order. In everything I touched I provided 
work — artistic work for thousands." 

" Yes ; but about this advertising. There 
are many miles of dead wall in suburban 



BANDEROLE'S ESTHETIC BILL 49 

lines that would be even more sombre and 
depressing were it not for the enamel and 
colour of wines, perfumery, etc." 

" I would have the bill-stickers taught 
fresco-painting — they can already wield a 
brush ; and they should then cover these 
walls with designs and pictures." 

"And the economy of it? How, for 
example, would your railways pay? " 

" The simplest thing in the world. The 
Government would, of course, take them all 
over; there would be only one class and 
one fare — a penny ; you would stick a 
stamp in your hat and go anywhere — 
from Charing Cross to Westminster or 
Wick. What would be the result of such 
an arrangement? Why, Britain would 
practically reside on its railways ; and you 
would have on every line, not a constant 
succession of trains, but one long unbroken 
train, going and coming, all day, all night. 
And the income — I've worked it out. 
Suppose twenty million people travelled a 
day — and I consider that below the aver- 



50 THE MAN FORBID 

age — you would have, at a penny a head, 
considerably over £30,000,000 per annum ; 
but at least two-thirds of the passengers 
would return the same day, which would 
give you a gross income of £50,000,000." 

" Figures like these speak for them- 
selves. And how did you get on with Lord 
WagstafF? " 

" Well, when I had the Bill drafted, I 
read it to Wagstaff's son. He was in a 
hurry at the time, but promised to tell his 
father about it. I offered to send him a 
copy, but he said he must speak about it 
first. Next week he went off for a two- 
years' tour round the world, and I don't 
believe he said a word to his father, for 
I wrote the Marquis three times, and re- 
ceived no reply. It was in March I drew 
up my Bill. I have never had such a time 
of pleasurable excitement since — hence my 
gloom." 

" And you never got on the pedestal? " 

" No. Yet I expounded my bill to all 
my friends. It is my unfortunate reputa- 



BANDEROLE'S ^ESTHETIC BILL 51 

tlon as a merely ingenuous person that 
stands in the way. I have overheard peo- 
ple, after the most eloquent exposition, say- 
ing, ' Sweet soul, Banderole,' ' Delightful 
creature,' ' So simple and confiding.' Now, 
Magsworth, honestly, tell me your opinion 
of my Bill." 

" I really haven't time. I have to go — 
I'm afraid I'm off on a two-years' tour 
round the world." 



ON WRITING A CAUSERIE 



ON WRITING A CAUSERIE 

1 SUPPOSE I am at liberty to tell the 
reader that this is my first causerie. 
Every reviewer thinks he can write a 
causerie, and doubtless that is why the edi- 
tor has asked me to try my hand; it is at 
least a new experience to be held up as a 
warning to other would-be causeurs. 
Doubtless some people are bom temble 
examples, some achieve the distinction, and 
some, like me, have it thrust upon them. 
It is satisfactory to know that the more 
egregiously I fail, the greater ought to be 
the benefit to others. Yet nothing, I am 
afraid, will warn aspiring reviewers ; like 
other contributors they are " all in a man- 
ner fierce," and it is so easy to say " / 
could have done better." 

What would you do if you were asked to 
55 



56 THE MAN FORBID 

fire off a causerie, your first causerie, at 
an hour's notice? 

It is said that Horace Vernet, painting 
some battle or other, caused a constant 
fire of muskets to be kept up in his atelier, 
and worked amid the noise and smoke until 
the picture was finished. Why, of course, 
then, when you are asked for a literary 
causerie point-blank, you will load your 
table with books you like and dip into 
them here and there until the pure liter- 
ary mood flushes your nerves and the fluent 
sentences come. And with the sentences a 
subject, and here it is: The Books that 
have a Literary Effect. 

Not all good literature has invariably a 
literary effect. One of the best of our 
living poets finds that his Muse takes wing 
whenever he reads Milton. On the other 
hand, a novelist of some standing screws 
his courage to the writing mood by a care- 
ful perusal of the advertisements of houses, 
etc., in a morning paper. Here, indeed, 
the law of contraries may seem to apply ; 



ON WRITING A CAUSERIE 57 

and yet, though Carlyle prepared himself 
for the task of rewriting the first volume 
of his " History of the French Revolu- 
tion " by a three weeks' debauch of Mar- 
ryat's novels, Goethe sought inspiration 
for his Iphigenie in a careful copying of 
Winckelmann's drawings of Greek sculp- 
ture. 

Literary biography, caressing one with 
the triumphs of others, is a sweet incentive. 
To read of the easy success of Scott always 
gives the novelist confidence. Here is 
Lockhart's " Life," the most enchanting, 
if not the greatest of English biographies. 
I think I can always write after looking 
over a page or two of Lockhart ; but I 
will not betray myself to the Philistines by 
reading any of it just now. Only, I must 
quote one passage. This is the first op- 
portunity I have ever had of doing so : 
it is really an opportunitj^ ; I did not men- 
tion Scott in the interests of the quotation. 
The best piece of writing in Lockhart's 
" Life," after some passages by Scott him- 



58 THE MAN FORBID 

self, is, in my opinion, Mr. Adolphus's ac- 
count of his visit to Abbotsford, and the 
best thing in Mr. Adolphus's account is 
his description of Scott's laugh. Having 
portrayed Scott's face, with a particular 
stress on his eyes, Mr. Adolphus goes on 
to say — 

Occasionally, when he spoke of some- 
thing very audacious or eccentric, they would 
dilate and light up with a tragi-comic, hare- 
brained expression quite peculiar to himself; 
one might see in it a whole chapter of 
" CcEur-de-Lion " and the Clerk of Copman- 
hurst. Never, perhaps, did a man go 
through all the gradations of laughter with 
such complete enjoyment and a countenance 
so radiant. The first dawn of a humorous 
thought would show itself sometimes, as he 
sat silent, by an involuntary lengthening of 
the upper lip, followed by a shy, sidelong 
glance at his neighbours, indescribably whim- 
sical, and seeming to ask from their looks 
whether the spark of drollery should be sup- 
pressed or allowed to blaze out. In the full 
tide of mirth he did indeed " laugh the 



ON WRITING A CAUSERIE 59 

heart's laugh/' like Walpole; but it was not 
boisterous and overpowering, nor did it check 
the course of his words; he could go on tell- 
ing or descanting while his lungs did " crow 
like chanticleer," his syllables, in the strug- 
gle, growing more emphatic, his accent more 
strongly Scotch, and his voice plaiiitive with 
excess of merriment. 

This is surely the most wonderful de- 
scription of a laugh. There is that very 
crow in Shakespeare referred to by Mr. 
Adolphus, and there is also that exquisite 
Shakespearean, " he will laugh you till his 
face is like a wet cloth ill laid up," and 
there is Carlyle's description of Teufels- 
drockh's laugh, but in none of these is the 
conception, gestation, and birth of the 
dimpled, rosy offspring of a great man's 
good-humour traced with such loving art 
and such perfect science as in this immortal 
paragraph of Mr. Adolphus's. 

Perhaps, however, writers, when not in 
the vein, are rather coaxed and soothed 
to their work by some minor writer that 



60 THE MAN FORBID 

thej love than spurred to it by emulation 
of the greatest men of letters. Hazlitt 
is such a source of inspiration. No one 
has a greater indifference to what has been 
said before than he. He is, as strikingly 
as Byron, the creature of his own will. He 
raises or lowers his subject to himself. 
" He exists not by sympathy, but by an- 
tipathy." One can be as strained, as pet- 
ulant as one likes — one can say anything, 
after a page of Hazlitt. No, not any- 
thing ; not if you know his essay on Byron. 
That pulls a man up. Hazlitt, in a very 
fine frenzy, had been calling Byron names ; 
he had even thought very little of " our 
author's turn for satire," and had " written 
thus far," when news came of Byron's 
death. Immediately Hazlitt recognized the 
peevish strain of his invective ; he had not 
known that he had been writing Byron's 
epitaph. Then follows a very splendid 
passage : " Death cancels everything but 
truth, and strips a man of everything but 
genius and virtue. It is a sort of natural 



ON WRITING A CAUSERIE 6l 

canonisation. It makes the meanest of 
us sacred; it instals the poet in his immor- 
tahty; and hfts him to the skies. We 
consign the least worthy quahties to ob- 
livion, and cherish the nobler and imper- 
ishable nature with double pride and fond- 
ness." Hazlitt was a great man. 

Here I have written something which is 
neither essay nor review, and which ■ — ■ 
need not therefore be a causerie ! I see a 
subject, nibble about it a little, and then 
go off and lug out, as if it were a new 
discovery, a famous old quotation that 
everybody knows. Then I make another 
dash at the sub j ect, and — take refuge in 
another quotation. It is at least, I hope, 
one way of writing a causerie, although I 
have mentioned only two out of twenty 
books I laid on my table. 

The unmethodical way, let us call it. 
Want of faculty, when rightly considered, 
is really a kind of faculty. If one really 
possesses a talent for doing things the 
wrong way, the power of putting the cart 



62 THE MAN FORBID 

before the horse with InfaHible exactitude, 
and an irresistible tendency towards the 
employment of that figure which gram- 
marians call hysteron-proteron, one may be 
said to have a gift. 

Still, it is well to be modest: this may 
not be a causerie, after all. It is true — 
as Isabey said — that to paint a picture is 
not a question of drinking the sea : " It is 
simply a matter of taking a few of the 
colours on my palette and spreading them 
upon a piece of canvas." But Isabey said 
also to another painter, " Decidedly you 
were born to be a surgeon. Your voca- 
tion dominates you : you wish to paint a 
boat and you paint a tumour." 

Many men always sneer at themselves 
when they have done their best. 



THE CRITICISM OF POETRY 



THE CRITICISM OF POETRY 

ANYONE who has ever trusted himself 
knows that knowledge is in the air; 
and that in brooding, in loafing, in living, 
knowledge is absorbed by the pores of the 
body. The eyes and the ears are the main 
thoroughfares of knowledge, but there are 
many by-ways intractable to sight and 
hearing, devious and. erratic in supposition, 
but as marked and inevitable as the seem- 
ingly wanton paths of fish in the river or of 
birds in the air. The body, the whole 
body, is also the soul. It is the nerves, the 
heart, the liver, the germs of life that ap- 
prehend and think and feel. The seat of 
memory is probably in the muscles. The 
brain is only a register and sifter — at the 
highest an alembic. Imagination gathers 
the flower of the whole anatomy. It is in 
this that the poet differs from the thinker, 

65 



66 THE MAN FORBID 

with whom it is the habit at present to con- 
found him. A thinker is one who has per- 
mitted his brain, the chief servant of his 
soul, to get the upper hand, just as the epi- 
cure gives the reins of power to his palate. 
In the poet the whole assembly of his being 
is harmonious ; no organ is master ; a dia- 
pason extends throughout the entire scale ; 
his whole body, his whole soul is rapt into 
the making of his poetry. Every poet is a 
new experiment ; all poetry is empirical. 
And this is simply saying over again that 
there is such a thing as poetry, and that 
poets are born into the world ; but as poets 
and poetry are rare, it may be no disservice, 
remembering that such a thing as a " boom 
in poets " has been talked of, to remind the 
running reader that the poet is the most 
exceptional of men. 

How is poetry to be recognised.'' Lit- 
erary criticism has a comparative method, 
the employment of a foot-rule or tape-line 
obtained by the study of accepted poetry, 
a method not altogether to be despised. It 



THE CRITICISM OF POETRY 67 

is, of course, the only possible method of 
dealing with the huge body of imitative 
verse ; but it does not commend itself to 
me in the criticism of actual poetry except 
as a most subsidiary aid. Poetry is the 
product of originality, of a first-hand ex- 
perience and observation of life, of a direct 
communion with men and women, with the 
seasons of the year, with day and night. 
The critic will therefore be well advised, if 
he have the good fortune to find something 
that seems to him poetry, to lay it out in 
the daylight and the moonlight, to take 
it into the street and the fields, to set 
against it his own experience and obser- 
vation of life, and, should he be a poet 
himself, to remember how it was that he 
wrote his own poetry. In this way I re- 
duce culture, which is only experience at 
second-hand, to its proper place as the 
merest handmaid of criticism. 

It seems to me that Mr. Victor J. Daley's 
" At Dawn and Dusk " deserves, in some 
measure, this actual criticism. The influ- 



68 THE MAN FORBID 

ence of Mr. Swinburne is apparent in 
" Years Ago," of Poe in the series called 
" Fragments," and of other poets in his 
ballads and sonnets. But " In a Wine 
Cellar " is an authentic Australian poem 
by an Australian poet : — 

No vintage alien 

For thee or me ! 
Our fount Castalian 

Of poesy 
Shall wine Australian, 

None other be. . . . 

It has no glamour 

Of old romance. 
Of war or amour 

In Spain or France; 
Its poets stammer 

As yet, perchance; 

But he may wholly 

Become a seer 
Who quaffs it slowly; 

For he shall hear, 
Though faintly, lowly. 

Yet sweet and clear. 



THE CRITICISM OF POETRY 69 

The axes ringing 

On mountain sides, 
The wool-boats swinging 

Down Darling tides^ 
The drovers singing 

Where Clancy rides. 

The miners driving, 
The stockman's strife; 

All sounds conniving 
To tell the rife. 

Rich, rude, strong-striving 
Australian life. 

Once more your hand in 

This hand of mine ! 
And while we stand in 

The brave sunshine. 
Pledge deep our land in 

Our land's own wine ! 

This is new and free. In " The Poet 
Care," there is the same freshness, the 
same novelty. 

Care is a poet fine: 

He works in shade or shine. 



70 THE MAN FORBID 

And leaves — you know his sign ! — 
No day without its line. 
/' 

He writes with iron pen 
Upon the brows of men ; 
Faint lines at first_, and then 
He scores them in again. 

Then deeper script appears: 
The furrows of dim fears. 
The traces of old tears_, 
The tide-marks of the years. 

To him, with sight made strong 
By suffering and wrong, 
The brows of all the throng 
Are eloquent with song. 

It is not to the purpose to say that this 
has been said and sung before. It is here 
sung newly, at first-hand, by a poet living 
at this present day in the fifth continent 
of the world. Adam and Eve said it to 
each other when they began to grow old. 
But it is all to say over again ; it is the 
mission of the poet to state the world 



THE CRITICISM OF POETRY 71 

afresh. The critic of words and phrases 
will find much to except in Mr. Daley's po- 
etry, although some of his workmanship 
is excellent, especially in his more conven- 
tional pieces : " The River Maiden," and 
" His Mate " are particularly fine. But 
academic questions of rhyme, rhythm, and 
diction have little more to do with poetry 
than epaulettes and pipeclay have to do 
with strategy. Poetry is not always an 
army on parade ; sometimes it is an army 
coming back from the wars, epaulettes and 
pipe-clay all gone, shoeless, ragged, 
wounded, starved, but with victory on its 
brows. 



tete-1~t£te 



TETE-X-TETE 

Cosmo Mortimer. Ninian Jamieson. 

NINIAN JAMIESON. Among your 
many theories, have you a theory of 
poetry, Cosmo? 

Cosmo Mortimer. I have! I have a 
theory of poetry. Poetry is that which 
had better not be expressed ; silence being 
impossible, poetry endeavours to atone its 
betrayal of secrets by beauty of utterance. 
It is a question, however, if perfect form 
is a sufficient excuse for lyric poetry. It 
would be difficult to defend the direct ex- 
pression of passion and emotion, and its 
publication by one man for others to read. 
For my own part all lyric poetry, " The 
Battle of the Baltic," or a sonnet of 
Shakespeare's, Shelley's " Cloud " or a 
love-song of Burns, holds me shamefast. 

75 



76 THE MAN FORBID 

I read such things furtively, and shp the 
book under a cushion and swear at the 
poodle if I'm dropped on. 

N. J, Then you'll have small regard 
for the poetry of women. 

C. M. I can't endure it. But of course 
you know I think women constitutionally 
inferior to men. 

N, J. But intellectually.? 

C M. Yes, of course; intellectually 
women have far and away the best of it. 
Since the world began, their intellects have 
been unintentionally trained at all hazards. 
The result is that they can neither think 
nor feel. They have not been allowed to 
eat and drink as much as men, to use 
their limbs with the freedom of men, to 
see all sides of life, to take an unrestricted 
share in the work of the world, to wander, 
to loaf, to disregard conventions ; their 
muscles, their nerves, their blood, and their 
vital organs, the seats of thought and emo- 
tion, are in a state of hebetation compared 
with those of men. But their intellects — 



TETE-A-TETE 77 

by intellect I mean brain, you understand 
— their intellects are developed so dispro- 
portionately as to constitute the one por- 
tent in the world. It is the intellect of 
woman unprovided with proper food and 
exercise of personal experience which has 
built up Society as unconsciously as the 
coral insect makes continents ; blindly, 
ruthlessly, with an hourly sacrifice pitched 
into the streets of a percentage of the 
healthiest womanhood. Woman rules the 
world; the thirty million wretched males, 
drilled and batoned into utter cowardice, 
in order that they rriay submit to be shot 
down at long range in cold blood, have 
their monstrous being solely that women 
may reign and be supported in ever-grow- 
ing comfort or luxury by the remaining 
males. 

N. J. It is a helpful point of view, 
Cosmo ; no doubt of it. But you are very 
discursive. We began with a theory of 
poetry; and I started the subject because 
I am curious to know what you think of 



78 THE MAN FORBID 

this. It is from a poem called " Mother- 
hood " in a volume entitled " In This Our 
World " * by a poet of the name of Stet- 
son. 

C. M. Stetson? Don't know him. 

N. J, American. Now : — 

Motherhood: seeing with her clear kind eyeSj 
Luminous, tender eyes, wherein the smile 
Is like the smile of sunlight on the sea, 
That the new children of the newer day 
Need more than any single heart can give, 
More than is known to any single mind. 
More than is found in any single house. 
And need it from the day they see the light. 
Then, measuring her love by what they need. 
Gives from the heart of modern motherhood. 
Gives first, as tree to bear God's highest fruit, 
A clean, strong body, perfect and full grown, 
Fair for the purpose of its womanhood, 
Not for light fancy of a lower mind: 
Gives a clear mind, athletic, beautiful, 
Dispassionate, unswerving from the truth; 

* Small, Maynard & Co., Boston. G. P. Put- 
nam's Sons, London. 



TETE-A-TETE 79 

Gives a great heart that throbs with human 

love, 
As she would wish her son to love the world. 
Then, when the child comes lovely as a star, 
She, in the peace of primal motherhood. 
Nurses her baby with unceasing joy. 
With milk of human kindness, human health. 
Bright human beauty, and immortal love. 
And then.^ Ah! here is the New Mother- 
hood — 
The motherhood of the fair new-made 

world — 
O glorious New Mother of New Men! 

What do you think of it.^^ 

C. M. Well, the verse itself Is not inter- 
esting ; but the matter is good didactic stuff 
of Its kind. Clearly the work of a manly 
fellow. 

N. J, This writer's rhymed verse Is 
better, I admit. Stetson has distinct gifts 
of Irony. In " An Obstacle " a " hulking 
prejudice sat all across the road," Immov- 
able by entreaty, passion, invective, until at 
last — 



80 THE MAN FORBID 

I took my hat, I took my stick, 

My load I settled fair, 
I approached that awful incubus 

With an absent-minded air — 
And I walked directly through him, 

As if he wasn't there. 

That's good; and so is this "A Brood 
Mare " — a healthy, broad horse-laugh : — 

I had a quarrel yesterday, 

A violent dispute. 
With a man who tried to sell to me 

A strange, amorphous brute. . . 

Said I, " Do you pretend to say 

You can raise colts as fair 
From that cripple as you can 

From an able-bodied marcf* '* 

Quoth he, " I solemnly assert. 

Just as I said before, 
A mare that's good for breeding 

Can be good for nothing more." 

Cried I, " One thing is certain proof; 
One thing I want to see; 



TETE-A-T£tE 81 

Trot out the noble colts you raise 
From your anomaly." 

He looked a little dashed at this. 
And the poor mare hung her head, 
** Fact is/' said he, " She's had but one; 
And that one — well, it's dead ! " 

C. M. A passable stable joke with a 
crude application to the coddling of 
women. 

N. J, If poetry is, as you assert, that 
which had better not be expressed, how 
does that rank? 

C. M. No class, my dear sir! It is 
exactly what must be expressed, and con- 
sidered until the eyelids ache. Here is a 
man in earnest, as no woman can ever be ; 
he uses any weapon that comes to hand, 
hit or miss, poetry or doggerel. Note 
that a woman would never do that; she 
would lose the battle searching for an agate 
for her catapult, while the man was sling- 
ing mud and macadam all the time. 

N. J. Ha ! Well ; listen to this : — 



82 THE MAN FORBID 

The female fox she is a fox; 

The female whale a whale; 
The female eagle holds her place 
As representative of race 

As truly as the male. 
One female in the world we find 

Telling a different tale. 
It is the female of our race 
Who holds a parasitic place, 

Dependent on the male. . . • 
The race is higher than the sex. 

Though sex be fair and good; 
A human creature is your state. 
And to be human is more great 

Than even womanhood ! 

C. M. I understand Mr. Stetson now; 
I see what he is driving at. The fight be- 
tween the sexes which, with the help of 
Christianity, ended in the triumph of the 
female, and the establishment of marriage, 
the family and home, he wishes to see re- 
newed. He would have women dethroned 
and brought down into the arena to com- 
pete with men — not some women, but all 



tSte-a-t^te ^s 

women. Probably he is right; it is the 
tendency of things at present. But before 
women elect to fight they should know 
that they have everything to lose ; and once 
they abdicate, they can never possibly 
attain again to the high position they have 
held for several centuries. In the arena 
they would be beaten ; and would imme- 
diately begin again, however unconsciously, 
to build upon their sex, not upon their 
humanity — accepting Mr. Stetson's dis- 
tinction — a latter, inferior empire of mar- 
riage, family, and home ; it is the nature 
of the female to nidify. Her intellect, 
functioning as instinct, leads her infal- 
libly to dominion ; but the moment she 
employs intellect consciously as intellect, 
society will dissolve ; man will once more 
become a hunter ; woman, a captive breeder 
and beast of burden. 

N. J. But you said just now that the 
intellect of woman constitutes the one por- 
tent in the world. 

C. M. So it does ; because she is becom- 



84 THE MAN FORBID 

ing conscious of it. She begins to know 
that her brain is, to start with, a more subtle 
and powerful organ than man's ; further, 
she feels that it has been developed to 
prodigious form and pliancy by thousands 
of years of intrigue, chicanery, stratagem 
in securing against all the individual in- 
terests of the male a soft nest for herself 
and her young. " Now," she says, " now ; 
I shall have my own again! This slow 
brain, this dull procreating brute of a man 
shall be put in his place at last. He shall 
know that I have been his conqueror all 
the time." That will precipitate the sex- 
ual fight in its elemental form ; and then it 
is the big, hard chest able to endure a bat- 
tering-ram that wins in the long run, brain 
or no brain. 

N. J. Let me read you another 
verse : — 

For the sake of my child I must hasten to 

save 
All the children on earth from the jail and 

the grave. 



tStE-A-TETE 85 

For so, and so only, I lighten the share 
Of the pain of the world that my darling must 
bear. 

You see : this American poet is a woman 
— Mrs. Charlotte Perkins Stetson. 

C M, There you are ! She makes me 
think she is a man ! Women are orchids ; 
there is no end of their deceptive appear- 
ances. 



A SPIRIT 



A SPIRIT 

MR. YEATS uses the wind as a sym- 
bol of desires and hopes : " Wind 
and spirit and vague desire have been asso- 
ciated everywhere." His poems, in " The 
Wind among the Reeds," are Hke the breath 
of a spirit, a keen and exquisite song. 

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths, 

Enwrought with gold and silver light. 
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths 

Of night and light and the half light, 
I would spread the cloths under your feet: 

But I, being poor, have only my dreams; 
I have spread my dreams under your feet; 

Tread softly because you tread on my 
dreams. 

Tread softly, because it is not a mortal 
dream that the winds awaken. It is dif- 
ficult to believe that Mr. Yeats has not 

89 



90 THE MAN FORBID 

been dead for many years, and now revisits 
the glimpses of the moon, the first trav- 
eller to return from the undiscovered coun- 
try. He has at least been with the Sidhe, 
the people of the Faery Hills, whose realm 
is not to be frequented with impunity if 
one would retain an interest in ordinary 
things. Although free of their company, 
Mr. Yeats has not yet lost human sym- 
pathies, as the delightful " Fiddler of 
Dooney," will tell : — 

When I play on my fiddle in Dooney, 
Folk dance like a wave of the sea; 

My cousin is priest in Kilvarnet, 
My brother in Maharabuiee, 

I pass my brother and cousin : 

They read in their books of prayer; 

I read in my book of songs 
I bought at the Sligo fair. 

When we come, at the end of time. 

To Peter sitting in state. 
He will smile on the three old spirits. 

But call me first through the gate; 



A SPIRIT 91 

For the good are always the merry^ 

Save by an evil chance, 
And the merry love the fiddle. 

And the merry love to dance: 

And when the folk there spy me. 
They will all come up to me, 

With " Here is the fiddler of Dooney ! 
And dance like a wave of the sea. 

Even here, however, the human sym- 
pathy is three parts tolerance ; Mr. Yeats's 
heart in this volume " goes out " most 
fully to a time " when the stars " shall 
" be blown about the sky like the sparks 
blown out of a smithy." 

It is the recurrent burden — 

While time and the world are ebbing 

away 
In twilight of dew and of fire. 

The wind cries in the sedge to the wan- 
dering Aedh: 

Until the axle break 

That keeps the stars in their round, 



92 THE MAN FORBID 

And hands hurl in the deep 
The banner of east and west, 
And the girdle of light is unbound, 
Your head will not lie on the breast 
Of your beloved in sleep. 

And in the meantime the Sidhe call, and 
come between the poet and the world of 
men and women. In their company he 
has attained a knowledge and insight into 
the way and beings of the twilight, un- 
seconded in our time. By reason of this 
he is an original poet of note. It is the 
Sidlie that point out to him : 

Old men playing at cards 

With a twinkling of ancient hands, 

and that tell him how to describe " pearls 
pale " fingers and " dove-grey " seaboards. 
His song is, indeed, like the voice of a dis- 
embodied spirit. Secrets are known, to 
him. He has a passport for the debatable 
land between the living and the dead; its 
marches are his daily walk; and his con- 
versation is with Caolte, who was a flaming 



A SPIRIT 93 

man, with Niam, the beautiful woman who 
led Oisin to the Country of the Young, 
and with his own creatures, Aedh, Hanra- 
han, and Michael Robartes, who are to him 
" principles of the mind," rather " than 
actual personages." With these are his 
walk and conversation, and with the living 
seers of Ireland; for it is all actual, and 
his first-hand acquaintance with the extant 
faery lore, of his country quickens his 
whole treatment of fairy mythology. Such 
a passage as the following in Mr. Yeats's 
copious notes brings the reader face to 
face with the subject in the flesh and in 
the spirit. " I once," says Mr. Yeats, in 
his own person, 

" stood beside a man in Ireland when he saw 
it (the Tree of Life) growing there in a 
vision^ that seemed to have rapt him out of 
the body. He saw the Garden of Eden 
walled about, and on the top of a high moun- 
tain, as in certain mediaeval diagrams; and 
after passing the Tree of Knowledge, on 
which grew fruit full of troubled faces, and 



94 THE MAN FORBID 

through whose branches flowed, he was told, 
sap that was human souls, he came on a tall 
dark tree with little bitter fruits, and was 
shown a kind of stair or ladder going up 
through the tree, and told to go up ; and near 
the top of the tree a beautiful woman, like 
the Goddess of Life associated with the tree 
in Assyria, gave him a rose that seemed to 
have been growing upon the tree." 

In another note Mr. Yeats writes: 

" A faery doctor has told me that his wife 
* got the touch ' at her marriage because there 
was one of them (the Sidhe) wanted her; and 
the way he knew for certain was, that when 
he took a pitchfork out of the rafters, and 
told her it was a broom, she said, * It is a 
broom.' She was, the truth is, in the magi- 
cal sleep, to which people have given a new 
name lately, that makes the imagination so 
passive that it can be moulded by any voice 
in any world into any shape.'* 

These passages, without the poems, 
would show that Mr. Yeats is no mere anti- 
quarian ; that he is not actuated by a tame 



A SPIRIT 95 

literary interest in faery lore. They show 
that he has a hving and intellectual regard 
for what is to most only a faded mythol- 
ogy, and that he is of an individuality rare 
at any time, rarest in ours. 



TETE-X-TfiTE 



TETE-X-TfiTE 

Parolles, Hamlet, 

PAROLLES, I have desired much to 
meet you, my lord, in this limbo 
where we now are. It has been my life- 
long habit to frequent the company of 
my betters ; and — Oh no ! my lord ! you 
must not give me the go-by. Nor could 
you: I stick like a burr. If you will not 
talk with me now, you may come to do so 
in some more relaxed mood, when your 
loquacity — for you are as talkative as I am 
— might lead you to say more than your 
memory would delight to recall as a no- 
secret shared with so ill a counsellor. 

Ham. You are of the same forge and 
bellows as myself — that world within the 
world which Shakespeare made. I will talk 
with you now. 

99 



100 THE MAN FORBID 

Par. It is of this world of Shakes- 
peare's making that I would talk. 

Ham, Sometimes I think it is the only 
world. Shakespeare found the world an 
empty nut and put a kernel into it. 

Par. Maybe; but human intelligence 
has eaten and digested that kernel at last, 
and the shell yawns for a new lining. 
Shakespeare, my lord, has been found out. 
It is I who am Shakespeare, not you. 
As I said three hundred years ago. 

Who knows himself a braggart_, 
Let him fear this ; for it will come to pass 
That every braggart shall be found an ass. 

I have come into my own again, my lord. 
Hitherto, Shakespearian has meant simply 
Hamletian. The good-natured world — 
for the actual world is at the last and in the 
gross exceedingly thoughtless and agree- 
able — I say, my lord, the good-natured 
world, highly flattered at its supposed re- 
flection, dressed its mind in the magic mir- 
ror of Hamlet, and fancied itself Shakes- 



TfiTE-A-XfiXE 101 

pearian. But Hamlet and Prospero are 
only the vanity of Shakespeare. I, Parol- 
les, am the true Shakespeare; and I can 
prove it. 

Ham. It is possible to prove anything 
by circumstantial evidence. Go on ; I con- 
sented to talk with you. 

Par, I am the true Shakespeare; be- 
cause, with the exception of the nurse in 
Romeo and Juliet, who is liker Shakes- 
peare than any other of his creations sav- 
ing myself, I am the only really live char- 
acter in all his plays. Falstaff, Richard, 
Juliet, lago, Nym, yourself, my lord, are 
merely fairies, good, bad, or indifferent. 
Mark you, my lord, mark it well : I do not 
imply that Shakespeare intended me for 
himself. I am the sub-consciousness, the 
inmost fibre of the man — the Judas of 
very self, which every artist unbeknown 
creates for his own betrayal. This men 
begin to recognise; and the moment they 
are fully aware of the self-deception of 
their Hamleto-Shakespearianism the em- 



102 THE MAN FORBID 

pire of Shakespeare is destroyed, and the 
world becomes once more an empty nut. 

Ham, And you come into your own 
again, videlicet, nonentity. 

Par. No, my lord; I alone remain, the 
self-pilloried monster, the Judas-Shak^s- 
peare who cozened the foolish world for 
three hundred years. 

Ham. Were we not spirits, and 
although I should be unclean afterwards 
until the evening, I would beat your face 
into a jelly with my hands. 

Par. Oh ! my lord, we know you can 
unpack your heart like a drab, and say 
more than you dare do. That I am Shakes- 
peare is made apparent to any awakened 
intelligence by the fact that what was sub- 
conscious as Parolles becomes conscious as 
a palliated, a self-excused characteristic of 
Hamlet, the mirror, the false, the magic 
mirror which Shakespeare held up to na- 
ture. But my main proof, my impreg- 
nable rock, is the book of sonnets. And 
here, my lord, is a new edition (I buy 



TETE-A-TETE 103 

them all: it is my book) a very good one, 
too : published by Mr. John Lane, of the 
Bodley Head, my lord, in the Albany. The 
book, I am impelled to point out by some 
hidden power, connected, doubtless, with 
my recrudescence, introduces a new illus- 
trator, Mr. Henry Ospovat, a Muscovite, 
to the English public. It was an original 
idea to illustrate Shakespeare's sonnets, and 
a very questionable one, I think ; hardly an- 
swered in the affirmative by Mr. Ospovat's 
pictures. 

Ham. Let me see them. Mr. Ospovat's 
art is of Rossettian origin, I should say. 
His pictures are interesting in themselves: 
some of the faces are unmistakable types. 
As comments on the text they are sug- 
gestive; there is subtlety in the painted 
beauty allowing the sonnet, which has 
caught fire at the candle lighting her mir- 
ror, to flare away in smoky flame as she 
reads it. I like these illustrations ; and 
it may be that it is just such works as 
Shakespeare's sonnets that should be illus- 



104 THE MAN FORBID 

trated rather than dramas and stories con- 
taining pictures in themselves. It is, how- 
ever, still a question with me whether or 
not one art is prostituted in illustrating 
another. 

Par. The old doubter, still ! Well, my 
lord, these sonnets are the evidence in chief 
for my identity with Shakespeare. In 
them I have written myself down infamous 
in the last degree: the hack and slave 
of Southampton and Pembroke; the go- 
between for courtiers and their mistresses ; 
a fatuous fool ; a debased sensualist ; and — 
You have broken my jaw, my lord. Was 
it well done to strike one who cannot strike 
back by reason of his inferior rank.? How 
the devil did I suddenly become embodied! 
I thought we were spirits ! Ugh ! I've 
swallowed a tooth ! 

Ham. You shall now go to your place 
in limbo and read this book from begin- 
ning to end, " The Mystery of Shakes- 
peare's Sonnets," an attempted elucidation 
by Mr. Cuming Walters. It will help you, 



TETE-A-TETE 105 

perhaps, to understand that Shakespeare 
was greater than either you or I ; that you, 
by many degrees inferior to the average 
sensual man, are less alive than almost any 
other character Shakespeare portrayed, 
lacking, as you do, both conscience and 
imagination. Beside you Pistol is beau- 
tiful and Bardolph sweet. What have you 
to do with the faults of Shakespeare .^^ 
Who is there at all that shall judge him.^ 
It is law all the world over that men must 
be judged by their peers. Where are 
those who may sit with Shakespeare .? 
Dante, Goethe, Hugo, Ibsen, are parochial 
beside him. Cassar, Charlemagne, Crom- 
well, Napoleon, are of a different order. 
Read Mr. Walters' book. He will clear 
your mind of the loathsome cant with which 
some men in the street have befogged 
Shakespeare for themselves. Respect the 
interesting elucidation Mr. Walters offers. 
I believe there is much truth in it. I my- 
self am likest Shakespeare of all the beings 
he made. Those tables on which I scrib- 



106 THE MAN FORBID 

bled against the wall of Elsinore that one 
may smile and smile and be a villain, are 
perhaps, the very tables on which Shakes- 
speare wrote his sonnets. So extraordi- 
nary a being would keep an extraordinary 
commonplace book. His sonnets are mem- 
oranda, written principally for himself, 
and although some of the matter is repro- 
duced in the plays, the meaning of much 
of it can only be guessed at. The persons 
of the sonnets are the symbols of a poetic 
shorthand of which the key perished with 
Shakespeare himself. Mr. Walters makes 
as fine a guess as may be. But whether 
you accept it or not, never again read into 
the sonnets a loathsome meaning. 

Par, Well, my lord, well. But I can 
tell you this, that Shakespeare's day is 
done. There is an end of him. 

Ham. If so, then, the end is not to 
come ; if it be not to come it will be now ; 
if it be not now yet it will come : the readi- 
ness is all. Shakespeare has been ready 
for the better part of three centuries. I 
question if Time is ready yet. 



A WOULD-BE LONDONER 



A WOULD-BE LONDONER 

SANDRIDGE came to London too late 
for what he wished to accomphsh. 
His ambition was to be a Londoner. It 
is true the Londoner is made, not born ; but 
at the very latest the process must begin 
at twenty-five. Sandridge was two-and- 
thirty when he left a North of England 
town, a circle of interesting acquaintances 
of which he was the centre, and a roomy 
old-fashioned house of his own, for Lon- 
don, solitude, and a modest apartment near 
Oxford Circus. 

In the provincial bosom, faith, even at 
thirty-two, meditates metropolitan mira- 
cles ; Sandridge expected to have the Lon- 
don mountains removed by a member of 
Parliament who was his second-cousin. 

" Ah," said the Member ; " you must be- 
gin to learn the ropes at a club." 

109 



110 THE MAN FORBID 

Needing for himself all the influence he 
could snatch, he resented Sandridge's un- 
connected state, and refused him a single 
bone. That is the use of the fable of 
" knowing the ropes " ; nobody believes in 
it; but it is very convenient to refer to 
when you are asked for assistance. 

" It's a shame," grumbled the Member. 
" A man's relatives ought to be able to 
help him instead of requiring help." So 
he put up his cousin at an expensive new 
club. 

" Let him find out the ropes there if he 
can," he snarled to an acquaintance. 

" As well there as anywhere, when you 
think of it, though," he continued, recon- 
sidering. " Have you found out the 
ropes? Has anyone ever found out the 
ropes ? No ; there's no rigging about it. 
It's simply a huge tumbling coil of hemp 
and iron, all tarred with the same stick ; 
and you get hold of a hawser-end or a 
chain-cable, and hang on or drop off." 

In the smoking-room of the new club, 



A WOULD-BE LONDONER 111 

Sandrldge made diffident remarks about the 
young Disraeli, the young Bulwer, about 
Count D'Orsay, about great talkers, about 
personalities who had been powerful out- 
side of politics, literature, and art : these 
were the Londoners he had talked of with 
such confidence in the North. He and his 
friends had discussed their waistcoats, their 
eloquence, their repartees, their influence 
on fashions of dress, fashions of speech, 
fashions of thought. 

In a month's time Sandrldge's diffidence 
changed into taciturnity. The younger 
clubmen chaffed him, and called him " the 
Disraelian Johnny." He withdrew into 
corners and moped in anterooms. One 
afternoon Lieutenant Hopeby of the Pur- 
ple Guards lounged in beside him: he was 
a very exquisite giant, twenty-three years 
old, guileless, as certain about everything 
as a child of seven, and his forte was 
patronage ; he felt himself an amateur 
Providence, and was always on the look-out 
for somebody to console. It was he, and 



112 THE MAN FORBID 

Sandridge knew it, who had struck out the 
phrase, " the Disraehan Johnny " ; but it 
was also he, and he only, who had given 
any real attention to Sandridge's remarks. 

" Well, old chap," began Hopeby, in his 
paternal way. " Let's have a comfortable 
talk. How do you get on? Do you find 
yourself becoming a regular Londoner? " 

Sandridge blushed to the roots of his 
hair; but he was quite powerless. He 
thought, writhing mentally, how Disraeli 
would have touched this youngster with a 
point of flame able to drill a passage even 
through his armour-plating of conceit ; 
whereas he hadn't a leaden dart to throw. 

" I am afraid," he stammered, " I am 
too old. Art is long and life is short, you 
know." 

" But you mustn't say that," replied 
the Purple Guard kindly. " Look at — 
what's his name ? — the old Roman who 
began to learn Greek on his death-bed. 
It's never too late to learn, as the penitent 



A WOULD-BE LONDONER 113 

thief said. But what's your difficulty, 
Sandridge ? " 

" Nobody ever asks me anywhere ; I 
never have a chance to — " 

" To what? Come, old chap." 

" Well," said Sandridge, shifting un- 
easily in his chair, " it's not like me to 
talk in this way — ah — Hopeby ; but I 
seldom have a chance to talk to anybody 
now. I'm awfully ambitious " — he could 
have bitten his tongue off at every word. 
" You've heard my idea of the Londoner, 
his place and power. My intention is to 
be a Londoner of that kind. I have edu- 
cated myself for such a position by the 
study of — by many studies; just as one 
is educated to take orders — or for the 
army. But I get no opportunity to — to 
exercise my functions." 

" Hard on you — eh? But I say, you 
know, you're quite an original, Sandridge. 
It's a new branch; deportment's nothing 
to this. You should have a professorship, 



114 THE MAN FORBID 

my boy ; teach them to be Londoners. I 
saw an article in a paper the other day — 
' Wanted, a New Occupation.' Here you 
have it : ' The Art of Being a Londoner, 
in twenty lessons.' You could charge 
what you like ; and you'd get it — for a 
time." 

"But I'm demoralised," rejoined Sand- 
ridge, overlooking Hopeby's banter. 
" The fellows here don't understand me." 

Then he added very slowly, measuring 
his words, that sometimes faltered, and with 
eyes that flickered! between confidence and 
timidity : " I take it that I have not yet 
met a foeman worthy of my steel. At a 
dinner of celebrities I believe I could at 
once make my mark." 

The Purple Guard sat up and stared at 
Sandridge for fully a minute. 

" Yes," continued Sandridge, misunder- 
standing the other's silence, and feeling, to 
his own surprise, as secure as a man who 
has led the ace of trumps for the last 
trick ; " yes, Hopeby, my place is in those 



A WOULD-BE LONDONER 115 

circles where conversation is understood. 
Here every man is full of himself and his 
own little affairs. They talk of the club 
cuisine^ of their regiment, of an actress, 
or of a billiard-player: a thought, an epi- 
gram, only makes them raise their eye- 
brows. I feel among you like an eagle in 
a dovecot." 

The Purple Guard sat back and watched 
Sandridge through his eyelashes. 

" Conversation is like piano-playing," 
went on the would-be Londoner, " and is 
not truly valued except by virtuosos. 
Most of you fellows, now, would as soon 
hear a piano-organ as Paderewski. I have 
practised talking; we used to practise it 
for hours daily in the North — the genial 
initiative, the sudden digression, the calcu- 
lated repartee, the retort in ambush, the 
fitted apologue, the grooved anecdote, the 
cascade of words, the slow sententious 
movement, the intolerant harangue ; we had 
an art and practice of talk with a termi- 
nology all our own. Yes, Hopeby, I have 



116 THE MAN FORBID 

it in me to make a great name as a con- 
versationalist." 

The Purple Guard sat up again. His 
surprise was over. It took this young man 
a very short time to docket and dismiss any 
revelation of character. 

" You're one of the queerest chaps I ever 
met, Sandridge," he said ; " and I'll tell 
you what I'll do for you. You know my 
uncle, the Pope ? " 

" Your uncle, the Pope.? " 

"I see you don't. Major Hopeby- 
Bonner, my uncle, is one of the best talk- 
ers in London, or has that reputation, 
which is better. Somebody of consequence 
whom he snubbed called him the Pope, and 
the name stuck. Now, he's dining here 
with me to-night. You come too, and the 
pair of you can talk for a wager." 

Sandridge accepted in a faint voice. 
He wished that it had been anybody but 
Major Hopeby-Bonner's nephew who had 
asked him, because he would have preferred 
to decline the invitation. He and his 



A WOULD-BE LONDONER 117 

friends had discussed the Major: his novels, 
poems and essays had all been declared in- 
ferior, the work of a callow amateur. 
Rumours of his gifts as a talker had also 
reached the North, and it had been decided 
that he was a mere farceur, on a level with 
the jester of antiquity. Sandridge had 
imagined himself brushing off like flies such 
people as Major Hopeby-Bonner ; to be 
asked to meet him as a man of the first 
importance blew the foundation-stone out 
of his aerial castle. But he quickly built 
another one ; told himself it would be prac- 
tice : went to his room, drank tea, and 
dipped into Lives of Carlyle, Beaconsfield, 
Macaulay, and Houghton till dinner-time. 

The Purple Guard introduced Sandridge 
to his uncle as " a talking chap, too." 
Sandridge, perspiring, wondered what Car- 
lyle would have done in such a circum- 
stance. 

Major Hopeby-Bonner, like most gar- 
rulous people, was a reticent, bashful man, 
who plunged into speech because silence 



118 THE MAN FORBID 

was accompanied with the discomfort of 
greater self-consciousness. 

"Talk," said the Major, "is diluted 
silence. I confess I could never carry 
more than a thimbleful of neat silence in 
an evening." 

" The idea," rejoined Sandridge, very 
white, and in an unsteady voice, but wish- 
ing to say something strong at once, 
" is — ah — hardly — is not — quite — It 
might have been phrased differently." He 
was thinking that Beaconsfield would never 
have said anything so vulgar. 

" It might," assented the Major, much 
amused. " How would you phrase it.^^ " 

" Well, I would have said," stammered 
Sandridge, " that — you remember, Car- 
lyle — . Really I think there is nothing to 
beat the proverb ' Silence is golden.' " 

" A good proverb. But what is the con- 
nection ? " 

" The connection ? — Eh — we were 
talking of silence. At least I think so." 

The Major smiled and went on with his 



A WOULD-BE LONDONER 119 

soup, and the Purple Guard said half aside 
to Sandridge : " Bravo ! that must be ' the 
retort in ambush' — eh? You've floored 
him; he hasn't a word to say, you see." 
He added, " What dd you think of London, 
Sandridge? " 

" It's — very big," stammered Sand- 
ridge, " and enormous crowds, and buses, 
and — I understand the fogs are dread- 
ful." He had no idea of what he was 
saying: he was going over in his mind the 
sentences that had passed between himself 
and the Major, trying to improve, or ex- 
plain away, his own ineptitude. 

" Ah ! ' the slow sententious movement,' " 
murmured the Purple Guard. 

" I have been in London half my life," 
said the Major; " and yet the mere speak- 
ing of the word ' London,' the overhearing 
it said casually, often thrills me with a sense 
of terror, and wonder, and delight." 

" Mesopotamia," trolled the Purple 
Guard. 

Sandridge, still several remarks behind 



120 THE MAN FORBID 

time, struck in: " The connection, Major 
Hopeby-Bonner, between what you said 
about silence and what I said is perhaps 
at first sight not very evident; but — " 
There he paused, and' for the Hf e of him 
could not resume his sentence. 

" We're w aiting for ' the sudden digres- 
sion,' " said the Guardsman ; and the Major 
smiled encouragingly. But it was all over 
with Sandridge ; he went hot and cold, 
turned ghastly pale, pleaded illness, and 
withdrew. 

That was his last appearance in a club 
or any haunt of men for a long time. He 
ceased all correspondence with his old 
friends ; he hid away his biographies and 
books of table-talk ; took all his food in 
his own room ; walked about the streets at 
night muttering to himself ; grew grey and 
bent ; and was watched by the police. One 
autumn evening, feeling that actual mad- 
ness beset him in his solitude, he slipped 
into the Cafe Cosmopolite. The band had 
just ceased playing a selection from II 



A WOULD-BE LONDONER 121 

Trovatore as he entered the dining-room, 
and the crowd was somewhat subdued. 
Many noticed Sandridge, and were moved 
by his appearance. His furtive hfe had 
given him a stealthy, ghding motion. His 
grizzled hair, which he wore long, had 
gone off his forehead, and showed a high 
brow ; his beard was also long and wizard- 
like. His slender, stooping figure, pale 
face, and deep-set, haunted eyes interested 
some spectators, and made others uneasy. 
He felt the impression he created, and was 
gratified. Next night he returned, and 
soon formed a habit of dining at the Cafe 
Cosmopolite every evening. He enters, a 
cold, self-centred figure, with wolfish, wan- 
dering eyes, like those of one who had been 
racked; and glides to his chosen seat. 
Women catch their breath as he passes, and 
all who see him for the first time ask who 
he is. Some think him like a picture of 
Christ; others, like Mephistopheles. The 
waiters know nothing of him ; but tell coun- 
try visitors that he is this, that, or the 



122 THE MAN FORBID 

other celebrity, according to fancy. He 
must be served in silence ; points out on the 
card and on the wine-list what he requires, 
and eats ravenously. He is never heard to 
utter a word except " Go away ! " if, as 
sometimes happens, a waiter forgets and 
addresses him. 

He is the type of failure, and a legend 
begins to grow round him. His ambition 
was paltry, but he pursued it highly. De- 
feated in his effort to be first, he refused 
any other place; and it is this element of 
greatness in his character which makes him 
now so impressive an apparition in the Cafe 
Cosmopolite. 



THE ART OF POETRY 



THE ART OF POETRY 

LIBERTY of utterance, spontaneity, 
is the mark of the highest poetry. 
To be spontaneous is the whole art of 
poetry, and especially distinguishes it from 
the artifice of poetry. It is therefore the 
main object of artifice to appear sponta- 
neous. The master-artificer of our time, 
more skilled than Pope, accomplished be- 
jond praise, never attained greater liberty 
of utterance than in the serenade in 
Maud: — 

She is coming, my own, my sweet; 

Were it ever so airy a tread, 
My heart would hear her and beat 

Were it earth in an earthy bed; 
My dust would hear her and beat 

Had I lain for a century dead; 
Would start and tremble under her feet, 

And blossom in purple and red. 
125 



126 THE MAN FORBID 

The master-artist of all time was never 
more at ease than in the overture to Twelfth 
Night: — 

O spirit of love, how quick and fresh art 

thou ! 
That, notwithstanding thy capacity 
Receiveth as the sea, naught enters there, 
Of what validity and pitch soe'er. 
But falls into abatement and low price, 
Even in a minute ! So full of shapes is 

fancy, 
That it alone is high-fantastical. 

There is no prompt effect in the blank 
verse to equal the quadruple knock of the 
artificer's rhyme; Shakespeare's careless 
fault, the rhyme " there " — " soe'er," is 
worse than Tennyson's repeated subjunc- 
tive " were it " ; but nothing in the blank 
verse requires such a resolute countenance 
or puts so much constraint on the imagina- 
tion as Tennyson's conclusion, " purple 
and red." It appears, then, that the care- 
lessness of the artist is unconsciously simu- 
lated by the artificer, the exigent form the 



THE ART OF POETRY 127 

instinct of the latter selects entailing dif- 
ficulties that make faults. Poetry is the 
most empirical of all the arts ; in a sense 
every poet is a charlatan ; he can give no 
authority except his own experience, his 
own imagination ; in the last resort he can 
give no authority at all ; he cannot tell : it 
was the Muse. Whether he be artificer or 
artist, and the true poet is always both, it 
is liberty of utterance he seeks. Poetry is 
the least artificial of all the arts ; it is at 
its best when it is most archaic. This is 
not a matter of obsolete words ; rather it 
is an eschewing of libraries, a getting back 
to the earth divested, saving the harp and 
sword, of all the inventions of man's hands 
and mind. Thus the freest utterance is 
always to be found in the narrative or the 
drama. Subconsciousness, which the poet 
singing in his own character inevitably ob- 
scures — that is to say, the eternal, the 
voice of the species — becomes audible in 
personation. The Elizabethan-Jacobean 
age, the great period of the drama, is also 



U8 THE MAN FORBID 

the great period of poetry, when every aid 
to free and full utterance was employed in 
the disdain of art. It was in The Spanish 
Tragedy/ that Kyd revealed the new and 
excellent way of the madman. Here was 
liberty at last ; everything could be said ; 
and the kernel of the world appear through 
the rent in the heart, the crack in the mind. 
Hieronimo announces the woe of the awak- 
ened intelligence trembling on the verge of 
madness in three lines, three crude lines that 
are not surpassed by any piercing utter- 
ance of Hamlet, Timon, or Lear : — 

This toils my body, this consumeth age, 
That only I to all men just must be, 
And neither gods nor men be just to me. 

It is a cry wrung from the inmost heart. 
These words do not occur in the additional 
matter; they are Kyd's, and they are the 
cognisance of Elizabethan tragedy.' 

In his quaint, erudite, and most readable 
preface (to the Temple edition). Professor 
Schick says of the play itself : " It is like 



THE ART OF POETRY 129 

an enchanted garden, where Hfeless wooden 
puppets seem to wait for the magician who 
is to wake them into life. We know that 
the magician did come, and of old Jeronimo 
he made Hamlet and Lear, out of Horatio 
and Bellimperia he made the loveliest of all 
wooing-scenes in Romeo and Juliet, of the 
play within the play he made the most 
subtle awakener of conscience." 
Kyd's fate has been that of most pio- 
neers. The crops of others wave on the 
land he cleared. But it would be easy to 
revive and perpetuate his memory. The 
Spanish Tragedy was so seminal in its own 
time, and, above all, was so influential in 
determining the character of some of 
Shakespeare's greatest work, that its regu- 
lar publication as an appendix in popular 
editions of Shakespeare would be much 
more to the purpose than the inclusion of 
Edward III., for example. Meantime, we 
have Mr. Dent's admirable " Temple Edi- 
tion," which I hope will be widely read. 
Professor Schick's " wooden puppets " is 



150 THE MAN FORBID 

extreme. Hieronimo, although only the 
outline of a character, is made by Kyd the 
mouthpiece of his own actual woe, and the 
" Painter's part," the interpolation whose 
fame eclipsed that of the play itself, and 
which might have been hurriedly written 
by Shakespeare, will arrest and hold the 
most careless reader. 



THOUGHTS ON IRONY 



THOUGHTS ON IRONY 



BEHIND phenomena I have found an 
inexorable irony. Phenomena them- 
selves are often beautiful ; but perhaps they 
are only accidentally connected with spirit- 
ual truth, skin-deep, the complexion of this 
irony. I may ultimately find that irony 
includes beauty, and is greater than beauty. 
If poetry, aided by science, should find that 
truth is ugly, poetry will say so ; but, as 
nothing is ugly to science, perhaps poetry 
may learn a lesson. 

n 

Worshipful Irony, the profound " Irony 
of fate," is doubtless responsible for Ren- 
anism, and all 'isms, but is derived from 
none of them. 

133 



134 THE MAN FORBID 

It is centric, the adamantine axis of the 
universe. At its poles are the illusions we 
call matter and spirit, day and night, pleas- 
ure and pain, beauty and ugliness. By it 
our enterprises are whirled away from our 
most resolved intentions. A playwright, 
wearing out his life in the abortive effort 
to found a county family, makes the litera- 
ture of the world Shakespearian centuries 
after his death ; the Pilgrim Fathers colo- 
nise America in the name of the Highest — 
that Tammany may flourish in New York ; 
and out of the beautiful Shakespearianism 
may come evil ; out of Tammany, good. 

Irony is the enigma within the enigma, 
the open secret, the only answer vouchsafed 
the eternal riddle. 

ni 

I am not a Mocker ; Mockery and Irony 
are not synonyms, as I understand them. 
It is true I called love " a mere broker for 
posterity;" but the image is homely, 
illuminative, and without disdain. The 



THOUGHTS ON IRONY 135 

advent of the Kingdom of Heaven was once 
likened to the approach of a thief in the 
night. 

Mj concern Is not exclusively with " the 
best, the noblest, and the happiest of men," 
but with the universe as I can grasp it. 
Irony is not a creed. The makers of creeds 
have always miscalled, denied some part of 
the world. Irony affirms and delights in 
the whole. Consciously, it is the deep 
complacence which contemplates with un- 
alloyed satisfaction Love and Hate, the 
tiger and the nightingale, the horse and 
the blow-fly, Messalina and Galahad, the 
village natural and Napoleon. Uncon- 
sciously, it is the soul of the Universe. 
Steep Irony in Chaos, and the universe will 
string itself about it like crystals on a 
thread. Whence comes Chaos? Whence 
comes Irony .f^ There is no reply. To be- 
lieve that the universe was made is the 
essence of anthropomorphism. I would 
have no more interest in a made universe 
than in an eight-day clock or a suburban 



136 THE MAN FORBID 

villa. Thought cannot conceive, nor fancy 
call by any name, the manner and agency 
of the becoming of the universe. But I 
perceive the universe as a golden bough of 
Irony, flowering with suns and systems. 



GEORGE MEREDITH'S ODES 



GEORGE MEREDITH'S ODES 

IT is as easy to find fault with the man- 
ner of Mr. Meredith's poetry as with 
the manner of Shakespeare's, or with that 
of any authentic writer, and there are those 
who hasten to do so. Mr. Meredith has 
of course always enjoyed the approbation 
of his peers and the reverential suffrage of 
his younger contemporaries, but the class 
which is attracted by the literariness 
of literature, second-hand minds whose 
thoughts are echoes, who have memory 
without judgment, and who, when they 
themselves attempt literature, " draw from 
a model," are now, and have been for long, 
so loud in the daily and weekly press, that 
a great poet like Mr. Meredith cannot find 
in contemporary criticism the mirror the 
poet needs, and is compelled, in his own 

139 



140 THE MAN FORBID 

words, " to look elsewhere." Censorship 
is that function of criticism which medi- 
ocrity most affects. By finding fault it en- 
deavours after a feeling of equality with 
that which is above it, unaware that admi- 
ration is the only and, happil}^, the gen- 
erous means by which the lesser nature 
can reach the level of the greater. 

I see a pitman, somewhat ragged as to 
his attire, who has laboured all day under- 
ground, trudging home and humming a 
tune by the way. A snob, on horseback 
perhaps, or in a brougham, on a bike, or 
on foot and ragged too, looks after him 
and cries out, " I say, my man ! Look 
here ! There's a hole in your coat ! " 
That represents much of the criticism of 
the day — contemptible in quality, impor- 
tant by its prodigious volume. The writ- 
ers of it are unable to connect criticism 
with understanding. Not to understand, 
but to stand over what is offered and in- 
sult grossly, seems to them in all good 
faith the natural thing to do. Decent 



GEORGE MEREDITH'S ODES lil 

honest people, whose vision is a cul-de-sac 
ending in a blank wall, and with whom 
detraction is a merit, have doubtless always 
existed in large numbers, have muttered 
their comments upon occasion, and served 
the purpose of the ages in some occult 
but necessary manner. " Now," a vehe- 
ment writer says, " a free press has en- 
dow^ed ineptitude and dulness with most 
unnecessary power and prominence, and 
made of them an actual portent. They 
are everywhere ; they creep into the best 
periodicals ; no editor can cope with them. 
At one time the ranks of the enemies of 
literature were recruited from its own out- 
casts, poets and novelists of ambition who 
had failed; but the native black rat has 
been eaten out or hunted into the lowest 
sewers by the hordes of vigorous brown 
rats, writers, namely, more or less suc- 
cessful, to whom literature is only a trade, 
and writers whose reviewing is their only 
connection with literature. To have an 
opinion, or to profess an opinion and be 



142 THE MAN FORBID 

able to state it, is all the qualification re- 
quired — the vast increase in the space 
devoted to books in the periodical press 
provides the opportunity. I suppose there 
is no one who can put two sentences to- 
gether who has not w^ritten a review and 
been paid for it. There are shillings, 
guineas to be had, weekly, monthly — 
pin-money, pocket-money. The result is 
that the word ' literature ' has become 
nauseous in tKe ears of the world ; that an 
authentic manner is considered affectation, 
and whatever cannot be read at break-neck 
speed is passed over as obscure." There 
is probably much truth in the remarks of 
this vigorous writer. Certain it is that, 
whereas music, art and the drama are more 
or less handsomely served by responsible 
critics, poetry and fiction remain pretty 
much the prey of anonymity. 

" Mr. Meredith is a poet : we admit that 
this man is a poet; but what is he doing .^^ 
Why, he is making poetry ! The man is 
actually singing ! We can't stand that ! " 



GEORGE MEREDITH'S ODES 143 

Here you have the essential objection 
taken to all true poetry, to all true things. 
If you can seem to be busy about a matter, 
like a bishop, for example, or a high priest, 
you are applauded of all men; but if you 
are actually doing it, like the tinker of 
Bedford or the Wayfarer of Galilee, you 
are not by any means applauded of all 
men. Or the cry may be, " Yes, Mr. Mer- 
edith is a poet ; but his principal work is 
in fiction : he is only a minor poet." This 
is the unconscious jealousy of men which 
cannot tolerate that one person should 
have two reputations. And as for his be- 
ing a minor poet, why, all contemporary 
poetry is minor poetry. Not until it has 
been loaded with the thought and emotion 
of generations of readers can poetry be 
said to be of age. It is the centuries that 
give poetry its majority. 

I now wish to illustrate, as far as can 
be done by extracts, the power and splen- 
dour of Mr. Meredith's " Odes in Contribu- 
tion to the Song of French History." 



144 THE MAN FORBID 

From the third ode I make no quotation, 
as it is a reprint. In the first, " The 
Revolution," is the following description 
of France risen against tyrants, — 

" War's ragged pupils ; many a wavering line, 
Torn from the dear fat soil of champaigns. 

hopefully tilled. 
Torn from the motherly bowl, the homely 

spoon. 
To jest at famine, ply 

The novel scythe, and stand to it on the field ; 
Lie in the furrows, rain-clouds for their tents ; 
Fronting the red artillery straighten spine; 
Buckle the shiver at sight of comrades strewn ; 
Over an empty platter affect the merrily 

filled; 
Die, if the multiple hazards around said die; 
Downward measure a foeman mightily sized; 
Laugh at the legs that would run for a life 

despised; 
Lyrical on into death's red-roaring jaw-gape, 

steeled 
Gaily to take of the foe his lesson, and give 

reply. 
Cheerful apprentices, they shall be masters 

soon ! 



GEORGE MEREDITH'S ODES 145 

This of France mated with Napoleon, 
" the man-miracle," " earth's chosen, 
crowned, unchallengeable upstart," " the 
arbiter of circumstance," is from the sec- 
ond ode, — 

** Nor ever had heroical Romance, 

Never ensanguined History's lengthened' 

scroll 
Shown fulminant to shoot the leven-dart 
Terrific as this man, by whom upraised, 
Aggrandised and begemmed she outstripped 

her peers; 
Like midnight's levying brazier-beacon blazed 
Defiant to the world, a rally for her sons ; 
Day of the darkness; this man's mate; by 

him, 
Cannon his name. 

Rescued from vivisectionist and knave. 
Her body's dominators and her shame; 
By him with rivers of ranked battalions, 

brave 
Past mortal girt : a march of swords and guns 
Incessant; his proved warriors; loaded dice 
He flung on the crested board, where chilly 

Fears 



146 THE MAN FORBID 

Behold the Reaper's ground, Death sitting 
grim, 

Awatch for his predestined ones 

Mid shrieks and torrent-hooves; but these, 

Inebriate of his inevitable device, 

Hail it their hero's wood of lustrous laurel- 
trees 

Blossom and print of fresh Hesperides, 

The boiling life-blood in their cheers." 

In the last ode, " Alsace Lorraine," Mr. 
George Meredith, the foremost man of let- 
ters in England, utters a high and noble 
message to France and to all men, the old 
message of renunciation with a new brav- 
ery in it : — 

" As light enkindles light when heavenly 

earthly mates, 
The flame of pure immits the flame of pure, 
Magnanimous magnanimous creates. 
So to majestic beauty stricken rears 
Hard-visaged rock against the risen glow; 
And men are in the secret with the spheres, 
Whose glory is celestially to bestow. 
Now nation looks to nation, that may live 



GEORGE MEREDITH'S ODES 147 

Their common nurseling, like the torrent's 

flower. 
Shaken by foul Destruction's fast-piled heap. 
On France is laid the proud initiative 
Of sacrifice in one self-mastering hour, 
Whereby more than her lost one will she reap ; 
Perchance the very lost again regain, 
To count it less than her superb reward. 
Our Europe, where is debtor each to each. 
Pass measure of excess, and war is Cain, 
Fraternal from the Seaman's beach. 
From answering Rhine in grand accord. 
From Neva beneath Northern cloud, 
And from our Transatlantic Europe loud. 
Will hail the rare example for their theme ; 
Give response, as rich foliage to the breeze; 
In their intrusted nurseling know them one; 
Like a brave vessel under press of steam, 
Abreast the winds and tides, on angry seas. 
Plucked by the heavens forlorn of present 

sun. 
Will drive through darkness, and, with faith 

supreme. 
Have sight of haven and the crowded quays." 

Mr. Meredith's " Odes in Contribution 



148 THE MAN FORBID 

to the Song of French History," is, in 
some respects, the most important book 
that has been given to the world for many 
years. It offers the heart of England to 
the heart of France ; it takes a proud step 
forward in the intemationalisation of litera- 
ture ; and it contains the first profound 
notes of the new epic — the epic of 
Democracy with Napoleon for hero. 



EVOLUTION IN LITERATURE 



EVOLUTION IN LITERATURE 

THE evolutionary idea is a misleading 
one in literature even more than in 
science and philosophy. Since the Ptole- 
maic system, nothing more satisfactory 
to common sense has been offered in any 
branch of knowledge than evolution ; but 
it is now supposed that the sun does not 
go round the earth, and it may very well 
be that the apparent descent of man is a 
sense-illusion also. It is known that oak 
trees do not grow from pine-cones, 
although an oak and a pine may stand 
side by side. It is known that monkeys 
never beget men although they frequent 
the same regions. Because Victorian lit- 
erature succeeds Georgian literature, and, 
at an interval, that of the first James, 
this epoch of letters is not necessarily 

151 



152 THE MAN FORBID 

related to those as child and great-great- 
great-grandchild. I suggest that English 
literature is a forest rather than a planta- 
tion ; a land of upheavals and disarranged 
strata that science can make little of yet, 
at least ; and a place of meteorites of which 
the earth can tell nothing. I suggest that 
evolution, reversing the proverb, cannot 
see the trees for the wood; and that gen- 
eralisation, most helpful in dealing with 
classes, is mischievous applied to individ- 
uals. I suggest that intelligence — poet, 
thinker, sinner, authentic person, or what- 
ever the fortunate-unfortunate may be 
called — will accept no creed ; that 
although evolution is bound to rule the 
minds of men for hundreds of years to 
come, intelligence knows it will be dis- 
missed, as the idea of creation is being dis- 
missed now ; and that intelligence, although 
compelled sometimes to use the evolution- 
ary idea in order to be comprehended by 
contemporaries, is unfettered by that idea. 



TETE-X-TfiXE 



TETE-X-TfiTE 

James Boswell. Dr. Jolvnson, 

JAMES BOSWELL. How, sir, would 
you define Poetry? 

Dr. Johnson. Poetry is the entertain- 
ment of the imagination by aesthetic inven- 
tions in language. 

J. B. Does that definition not apply as 
well to prose? 

Dr. J. It does in a limited measure ; 
but poetry, alone in verbal art, excites the 
imagination to the highest pitch and sat- 
isfies the aesthetic desire it arouses. 

J. B. Is it possible to state how poetry 
does this? 

Dr. J. Yes, sir. The restraint upon 
prose is one of common sense; whereas 
the restraint upon poetry is that of 
rhythm. 

155 



156 THE MAN FORBID 

J, B. Rhyme, sir? 

Dr, J. You talk like a fool, sir. 
Rhyme is not essential to poetry. It is 
the restraint of rhythm which is the source 
of the pleasure poetry gives. The differ- 
ence between prose and poetry is the dif- 
ference between walking and dancing. 
The former is an exercise, or a means of 
transit from one point to another; and 
having got into the way the walker has 
nothing to do but follow his nose at what- 
ever pace and length of stride he chooses 
or utility requires. The latter, as it 
happens, exercises the dancer ; but the pur- 
pose of the dancer is to take and give 
delight, and in all his gyrations, sallies, 
twists and turns, poses, steps and pirou- 
ettes, he is obedient to the strictest law 
of rhythm. 

J. B, But, sir, Kemp, the Elizabethan 
actor, danced all the way from London to 
Norwich, which was surely a transit from 
one point to another. 

Dr. J. Sir, your illustration is imper- 



TETE-A-TETE 157 

tinent. It was the Morris that Kemp 
danced, with bells at his ankles; in itself 
a comic performance related to dancing, 
as Hood's punning ballads are related to 
poetry; and, as Kemp reiterated and pro- 
longed it in his notorious itinerary, a per- 
version of function more ridiculous than 
it would be to reprint " Faithless Nelly 
Gray " over and over in a score of vol- 
umes of the bulk of the Encyclopaedia 
Britannica. 

J. B. Two anachronisms, sir! You 
live long before the Encyclopaedia Britan- 
nica and Thomas Hood. 

Dr. J. They are nothing, sir, to the 
anachronisms I expect to commit in the 
course of this conversation. 

J. B. To resume, sir. Rhythm is not 
confined to poetry. Let me quote a 
passage from Sir Thomas Browne : — 

Pyramids, arches, obelisks, were but the 
irregularities of vain-glory, and wild enormi- 
ties of ancient magnanimity. But the most 
magnanimous resolution rests in the Christian 



158 THE MAN FORBID 

religion, which trampleth upon pride, and 
sits on the neck of ambition, humbly pur- 
suing that infallible perpetuity into which 
all others must diminish their diameters, and 
be poorly seen in angles of contingency. 

Dr. J. The passage takes me between 
wind and water, both by reason of its 
meaning and the stateliness of it. I did 
not, however, set out to deny that there 
are rhythmic sentences in prose. And 
I grant also that a queenly walk, a lofty 
carriage, are more to be admired than 
ordinary dancing. What I maintain is 
that the rhythm of poetry, being, unlike 
that of prose, fettered by metre, delivers 
poetry from the law of common sense, as 
a prisoner is delivered from the ordinary 
responsibilities of life. To be a prisoner 
is itself, both for the observer and the 
sufferer, a more interesting, a more ab- 
sorbing, condition than to be free. Every 
spontaneous action and word of a pris- 
oner assume extraordinary significance ; 
and the expression or concealment of his 



TETE-A-TETE 159 

emotions, his very nonsense and grimaces, 
obtain a value of which freedom knows 
nothing. The dancer and the poet are 
prisoners, and as long as they move, yield- 
ing to their impulses and exerting their 
energies in their chosen or imposed fet- 
ters, they arrest and hold the attention, 
and, in proportion to the beauty and pas- 
sion of the art displayed, entertain and 
satisfy the imagination of the spectator, 
of the listener or competent reader. 

J. B. I am astonished, sir, to hear you 
maintain that poetry is above common 
sense. 

Dr, J. It is so, nevertheless. Attempt 
to translate Mercutio's Queen Mab speech 
into prose, and see what you will make of 
it. Or take a serious passage — Othello's 
famous image — 

Like to the Pontick sea, 
Whose icy current and compulsive course 
Ne'er knows retiring ebb, but keeps due on 
To the Propontick and the Hellespont; 



160 THE MAN FORBID 

Even so my bloody thoughts, with violent 

pace, 
Shall ne'er look back, ne'er ebb to humble 

love, 
Till that a capable and wide revenge 
Swallow them up. 

Reduce this to prose and it would be im- 
possible to read it with a sober face. It 
is the metre, the lightning dance of it, 
that lays common sense under a spell. To 
say it slowly, would almost be to translate 
it into prose. Poetry is like music, and 
must be taken at its proper time ; and here 
the verse leaps, straining to the cataract of 
the close: 

Till that a capable and wide revenge 
Swallow them up. 

I am certain that I have not been enabled 
to speak according to my wont, and have 
been made to say things altogether out 
of character, as well as anachronistic ; but, 
sir, I am always glad to be resuscitated 
under any conditions not dishonourable. 



POETRY AND CRITICISM 



POETRY AND CRITICISM 



4 4 X T is very questionable whether a poet 
M can have any vital interest in any 
poetry except his own. I think a poet 
gradually ceases to take any interest in 
literature as literature. As part of life, 
literature, whether it be poetry or prose, 
occupies an inferior place in the world. 
Compare literature, for example, with eat- 
ing and drinking, with making love, with 
making money. Literature in the banquet 
of life is now a Jiors d'oeuvre, now a ciga- 
rette ; no more than that. Consider, then, 
what an insignificant thing the criticism of 
literature must be. I often wonder who 
reads reviews ; with the exception of the 
reviewer and the author reviewed, who are 
they? People read books from the libra- 
rian's list and from gossip at dinner, not 
upon the advice of the critic." 

163 



l64> THE MAN FORBID 

" Then where is the use of criticism? " 

" It has no use, of course ; but apart 
from the question of utihty, this enormous 
production of books of all kinds, and the 
daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly waste of 
criticism is the result of enchantment. You 
must never forget that the whole world 
is enchanted. People can't help them- 
selves ; they have language, they have pens 
and paper; one writes, another writes. 
And it is all inferior, the very highest of 
it, to a thing done. The power of the pen 
has been grossly exaggerated. Napoleon, 
not Goethe, made the modern world. 
Everybody knows the life of Napoleon and 
its meaning — " the tools to him that can 
handle them." Every man goes Nap ; and 
the women want to play too." 

" I'm afraid you'll be very cruel to the 
poets." 

" Oh no ! A poet is always a man of 
inordinate ambition and. inordinate vanity. 
If his every book is not universally pro- 
nounced the finest poetry since Shakespeare 



POETRY AND CRITICISM 165 

he incontinently breaks his heart. But if 
he is really a poet his heart mends again, 
and is the stronger for the catastrophe. 
I do not say this to signify that I purpose 
splintering hearts out of kindness. I 
merely indicate that I understand the po- 
etical temperament, and that if I should 
hurt anyone, I know the immense recuper- 
ative power of the poet too well to be 
over-concerned; and everybody will tell 
you that if a poet or any other writer can 
be killed by criticism the sooner it is done 
the better." 



tete-X-t£te 



TETE-1-TETE 

Froude. Carlisle. 



F 



ROUDE. I have often thought that 
we need in hterature something anal- 
ogous to Pre-Raphaehtism in art. 

Carlyle. What is Pre-Raphaehtism? 

F. I hardly know. The Pre-Raphael- 
ites were, I believe, artists who picked up 
art not where Raphael left off but where 
he began. 

C. It doesn't matter much. Their 
idea, I dare say, was to get rid of all con- 
vention, and begin art over again for 
themselves. And that was highly com- 
mendable. Something analogous to that 
is desirable in literature. Tennyson with 
his confections of passion for use in ladies' 
seminaries, and Browning with his frantic, 
terrified optimism, and the restless, over- 

169 



170 THE MAN FORBID 

hasty spinning-jenny in his head, are not 
much to my hking. They both of them 
represent England of the broadened fran- 
chise and repealed corn-law; they are 
bourgeois to the core, and rose to emi- 
nence with the rise of the middle class, 
the dominant factor in the life of the cen- 
tury. 

F, What do you say to " The City of 
Dreadful Night," by James Thomson? 

C. Thomson's poems will always com- 
mand attention because they sprang di- 
rectly out of his life. I think that he was 
by Nature endowed beyond any of the 
English poets of his time. There are no 
half -measures with Nature when she really 
takes a matter in hand. And so she gave 
Thomson, let us say, passion and intellect 
second only to Shakespeare's ; fitted him 
for the fullest life — not that he might 
occupy and enjoy, however. Nature is the 
great spendthrift. She will burn up the 
world some day to attain what will prob- 
ably seem to us a very inadequate end ; and 



T^TE-A-TfiTE 171 

in order to have things stated at their 
worst, once for all, in English, she took 
a splendid genius and made him — an 
Army schoolmaster ; starved his intellect, 
starved his heart, starved his body. All 
the adversity of the world smote him; and 
that nothing should be wanting to her 
purpose, Nature took care that the very 
sun should smite him also ! And how gal- 
lantly the victim bore himself! Time will 
avenge him: he is among the immortals. 
He, indeed, is a Pre-Shakespearian. 

F, Ha ! What do you mean by a Pre- 
Shakespearian ? 

C. I mean, first of all, Shakespeare 
himself. Shakespeare was no Shakespear- 
ian. Often the name of a cult is a mis- 
nomer. Three centuries of English inepti- 
tude have made of Shakespeare — not only 
the popular Shakespeare, but the Shake- 
speare of the schools — a very tame and 
bloodless portent indeed, the smug person 
written of by Hallam, Tennyson's " Shake- 
speare, bland and mild." They have made 



172 THE MAN FORBID 

of him a sort of statue of Memnon, with an 
infinity of notes, it is true, which responded 
to the sunset as well as the sunrise, and 
to other reagents ; but still an automaton, 
a musical box which could play any tune, 
with a preference, surprising in mechan- 
ism, to go off with Hamlet. Precisely into 
Hamlet, the mediocrity, the man in the 
street ; a loquacious person ; a busybody, 
given to reading books after dinner and 
scribbling on the margins ; one that kept 
a diary and wrote letters to the newspa- 
pers. A Parliament-man, a debater! He 
would have been a good bishop, a good 
under-secretary ; and might have remained 
solvent as a stock-broker. This is the 
Shakespeare of the English ; the cult of the 
Shakespearians. Hamlet, the middle-class 
man, stares out of all our middle-class lit- 
erature ; and there is practically no other 
in England. Hamlet ! Why, Shakespeare 
was himself a world: Coriolanus and Fal- 
staff are the poles of him: Hamlet is no- 
body ; I prefer lago. 



TETE-A-TETE 173 

F. Would you have our literature de- 
velop out of lago and Thersltes? 

C. I would not have it develop out of 
Shakespeare at all. I would have men put 
Shakespeare aside for half a century. He 
is in the way. Suddenly we find that 
Shakespeare blocks the road. He was ad- 
mirable, he was necessary before steam ; 
the world would have been at a standstill 
without him. Now it can't get on because 
of him. Steam, electricity, and the news- 
paper have made Shakespeare out of date ; 
it is they that have turned the world upside 
down ; they and a little word Evolution 
have wrought in sixty years a greater 
change than was elaborated in all the cen- 
turies from the first Christian community 
to sansculottism. Men don't know it, or 
hate to recognise it ; they try to be what 
their literature is, what their old establish- 
ments are or seem. They read Hamlet and 
are Shakespearian in an empire the inhab- 
itants of which are mainly Mohammedans, 
Brahmans, Fire-worshippers ; in a country 



174 THE MAN FORBID 

where the race for wealth has set morality 
coughing and sweating in a galloping con- 
sumption ; at a time when the aristocracy 
of intellect — (the English from the most 
heraldic peer to the sireless apprentice are 
the middle-class of Europe, the prosperous, 
pushing shop-walkers of the world) ; at a 
time when the aristocracy of intellect have 
set their crucibles in the furnace, and have 
thrown in everything, themselves and all 
the past, the English are reading Hamlet. 
The hen thought the sky was falling 
when the pea dropped on her head ; but 
the skies have fallen — on the wicked game- 
cock across the Channel, thinks the Eng- 
lish bird of dawning. We are a great 
race. 

F. Out of what, then, is this desirable 
Pre-Shakespearianism to evolve? 

C Out of a reverence for fact. 

F, That has been tried in the cult of 
le sens du reel, in realism, in naturalism. 

C. I did not say a reverence for matter- 
of-fact. 



-y 



TETE-A-TETE 175 

F. Indeed it was a hideous develop- 
ment. 

C. Oh, much adverse comment has 
been ehcited by the writings of a certain 
school; but the acute stage is past, and 
literature has been purged of some of the 
peccant humours that accumulate during 
periods of transition : the python comes 
forth brilliant from his old skin, but the 
process of sloughing is not comely. That 
matter-of-fact fiction, as far as it suc- 
ceeded in being matter-of-fact, was the 
mere lifeless eschar of literature ; through 
it the new tegument appeared living and 
healthy. But truly it was in dead earnest. 
It tried to wrap its imagination in a nap- 
kin, bury it certain fathoms in the earth, 
and go about with a notebook painting its 
epoch. That could not last ; that could 
not even get begun. The point of view ^ 
of realism was essentially the Devil's point 
of view. The adversary, the accuser, 
started out with notebook and stylographic 
pen. 



176 THE MAN FORBID 

F. It might have shamed our easy-go- 
ing sinners to know that the chance of 
escaping detection was much minimised 
when the Devil learned shorthand. 

C. Oh, no ! for the Devil, when he set 
himself to examine the matter carefully, 
discovered that man is a stomach, first and 
last. For some time, this discovery, like 
the discovery of the New World, was a 
thing expected, a thing known — but how 
to get there? Like all great achievements 
it was quite simple — easier than setting 
an egg on its end, or sailing to America. 

F, How, then? 

C. By asserting it. " Man is a stom- 
ach." Great is assertion. At once the 
complex world is simplified. It is found 
to consist of beef and greens, which man, 
the stomach, can distil into blood. But 
how is this? What has happened to our 
sublime theory of irregular verbs? How 
has the stomach become saddled with this 
Old Man of the Sea, these entirely supere- 
rogatory organs which perform the unwar- 



tStE-A-TETE 177 

rantable functions of thinking and imag- 
ining? How much better if man had been 
as the hydras, patent reversible handbags 
that Hve most self-sufficingly in ditches, and 
can be turned outside-in without damage. 
Alas ! man is not a hydra. The great dis- 
covery turned out to be no discovery. The 
realist assiduously attempting to set down 
whatever is commonplace, whatever is mat- 
ter-of-fact, en pleine platitude, struggling 
to circumscribe his sens du reel by those 
things only which can be touched, tasted, 
smelt, found himself, to his amazement, 
haunted at every step by a ghost which 
would not be laid — Imagination, in all 
men, but most unescapably in himself. He 
has to write alone, in his study, far from 
the presence of the people and business of 
his work. And the bulk of his realities is 
picked up at second-hand — from reports, 
from conversations, newspapers, documents. 
There is no help for it, but to imagine. 
The attempt has been made, from the Dev- 
il's point of view, to state man as a stom- 



178 THE MAN FORBID 

ach, and, in order even to get the attempt 
started, it was necessary to employ what is 
divinest in man — his imagination. 

F. But we are no nearer the fountain 
of a desirable Pre-Shakespearianism. 

C It will come ! It will come ! The 
first bubblings of it may be heard 
already. 

F. Where? where .^^ Shall I, for ex- 
ample, find a rill of it in Nietszche? 

C. In Nietszche ! How dare you men- 
tion Nietszche to me? A great man; a 
man of unexampled divulsive power, but 
spoilt for want of a knowledge of my writ- 
ings. And it is your fault — your meagre 
nature that could make no more of me than 
that ill-tempered, lugubrious figure you so 
often bored to death. Your life of me is 
the worst disservice literature has ever suf- 
fered. Out of it the world knows me, and 
cares not for my books on that account. 
It is Froude, not Carlyle, that the world 
and Nietszche know; of you Nictszche's 
final word on me may be true : " He is an 



TETE-A-TETE 179 

English atheist who aspires to honour for 
not being: one." It is false of me. The 
realist would state the world as stomach. 
Nietszche stated it as Chaos. Both have 
been called Diabolists ; but there is no such 
being as a Diabolist. Even those wretched 
creatures who celebrate the black mass are 
in that very act non-diabolic, for they are 
endeavouring to worship. God, as well as 
the Devil, is in all men. Had I written my 
" Exodus from Houndsditch " I would have 
employed the Devil to burn up the weeds, 
but I would have saved the ethical hemp- 
stalk of it. In Nietszche's " Exodus from 
Houndsditch " he has burnt up the moral- 
ity, too ; he could see nothing else for it 
but that. Woe's me ! The message which 
is in the very name Diogenes Teuf elsdrockh 
has fallen on stony ground! 

F, I have heard that Nietszche, having 
destroj^ed the whole world of thought, in- 
tended a reconstruction. 

C. He did. He meant to restate the 
world as Lust for Power. 



180 THE MAN FORBID 

F. Would you recommend Englishmen 
to read Nietszche? 

C I would indeed. Such a tonic the 
world of letters has not had for a thousand 
years. Nietszche set himself, smiling, to 
dislodge the old earth from its orbit ; and 
— it is something against such odds — the 
dint of his shoulder will remain for ever. 



tete-1-t£te 



TETE-X-TfiXE 

Baptist Lake. Islay Ingl'is. 

BAPTIST LAKE. I haven't seen you 
for five years. Where have you 
been ? 

Islay Inglis, In Dover, for a holiday. 

B.L. Dover? Well! 

7. 7. I know what you mean ; but I tried 
Folkestone, and found it intolerable. I 
sat on a chair on the Leas all a forenoon. 
The band played; the seated crowd, all on 
chairs, mainly ladies, hushed and solemn, 
glanced furtively at labelled fiction, cau- 
tiously turning the leaf. Gentlemen, 
groomed like carriage-hacks, attired in hot- 
pressed suits they seemed afraid to crease, 
conversing at intervals in diplomatic whis- 
pers, trod the withered turf — withered and 
beaten to powder by the unslaked steps of 

183 



184 THE MAN FORBID 

the march of summer and the superfine 
tread of uneasy fashion. The flame-tipped 
music of Carmen, the molten sapphire of 
the sea, the saffron beach far down, and the 
lofty sun emptying its inexhaustible urn 
of fire, were all tamed and fettered to the 
living death of a well-to-do crowd, en- 
chanted out of humanity into the likeness 
of unedified and unedifying creatures. At 
Folkestone Holiday is a Function. 

B, L. Terrible ; but accurate, I fear. 
Function is the gangrene of modem social 
life. But what led you to Dover .? 

/. I. Chance. I — . 

B. L. Now, how often have I asked you, 
Islay, never to use the word " chance " ? 
The use of misnomers is the propagation of 
ignorance. Endeavour always to think the 
unthinkable ; give at least a new name to 
the unknown, and in time you will pave the 
abyss and cast a bridge over the Milky 
Way. You went to Dover, you say, actu- 
ated by the profound law which led you 
there. Well.? 



TStE-A-TETE 185 

/. 7. My first intention was to walk 
about Romney Marsh. You know " the 
earth is divided into Europe, Asia, Africa, 
America, and Romney Marsh." Romney 
Marsh is, I suppose, one of the newest 
pieces of land in the Old World. No an- 
cient Briton ever trod its southern verge; 
and the waves rolled over it while the neigh- 
bouring seaboards echoed the drums and 
tramplings of three conquests. There 
must be virtue in such virgin soil. It is 
the true country for Antaeus. But there 
was no room in Dymchurch, not even in 
the inn — the virtue of the land is known to 
many. So I forwent Romney Marsh, and 
took rooms on the Marine Parade in Dover 
after that dreadful experience at Folke- 
stone. 

B. L. Was that beautiful girl with you 
— Rose Salerne, who drank shandy-gaff 
with the thirst of perdition in the " Rose 
and Crown " at Pilgrimstow? 

/. /. Rose Inglis now. Baptist. 



186 THE MAN FORBID 

B. L. You married her ! Mj dear boy, 
that was exquisite of you. 

/. /. I think it was exquisite of us both. 

B. L. And so daring ! 

/. /. True ; the marriage of a really in- 
telligent couple is now the most daring ex- 
ploit reserved for the adventurous. 

B. L. It was more daring to go to 
Dover for a holiday. 

/. /. Not for me. I was quite at home 
in Dover. The majority of the holiday- 
makers' there are of the lower-middle class, 
to which I belong. 

B. L. The lower-middle class, Islay ? 

I. I. Yes ; the fountain of aristocracy 
— not, of course, the parasitical aristoc- 
racy of birth and title, but the best blood 
and brain of the world. Consider it briefly, 
at a venture. Homer, Virgil, Dante, 
Shakespeare, Goethe, Burns, Carlyle, all of 
humble extraction. 

B, L. Dante? 

/. /. On the mother's side, certainly. 

B. L. Cervantes? 



TETE-A-TETE 187 

/. /. There must be exceptions ; but 
although Cervantes' parentage was of rank 
on both sides, in order that what was best 
in him should appear he had to be brought 
lower even than the lower-middle class ; out 
of slavery and prison he came, the greatest 
man as man of those who lived by writing. 

B. L. And what about men of action? 

/. I. Zenghis Khan, Tamerlane — 
sheepstealers and landloupers ; Moses, the 
son of slaves in Egypt ; Mahomet's father, 
although, like all the lower-middle class, 
related to some of the highest families, was 
a poor man ; Alexander of Macedon, Julius 
Caesar, William the Conqueror, Napoleon 
Bonaparte, Abraham Lincoln — a tide of 
elemental blood beat in the hearts of all 
these. 

B. L. Alexander, the son of a king and 
of a king's daughter? 

I. I. The son of a king's daughter, the 
luxurious Olympias ; his father may have 
been anybody : Philip himself was willing 
to ascribe the paternity to Jupiter. Wil- 



188 THE MAN FORBID 

liam the Conqueror, the tanner's grandson, 
is a typical example ; Robert of Normandy, 
the parasitical aristocrat of birth and title, 
in order that his son might be more than 
that, was compelled to select his mother 
from the lower-middle classes. Of escutch- 
eons that seem without a blot, who can tell 
how many mothers, in order that their sons 
might be great, had to fall back on illegiti- 
mate fathers? 

B. L. I should like to see you attempt 
a grammatical analysis of that last sen- 
tence ! So, then, in order to support your 
theory, you would tarnish the fame of 
queens ? 

/. /. Nothing is sacred to the theorist. 
But you make me outrageously discursive. 
I say, I went to Dover with Rose; and we 
delighted in it, because it is a holiday resort 
of the lower-middle classes. We sat on the 
beach and watched the young Mahomets 
and Tamerlanes at play ; we paraded the 
pier to the strains of the military band; 
and all the evenings were Elysian with the 



tete-a-t:6te 189 

electric illumination of the Marine Parade. 
The wandering minstrel sang — 

Rhoda rode a roadster on the road to 
Ryde; 
I also rode a roadster on the road by Rhoda's 
side; 
When next I ride to Ryde with Rhoda she 
will be my bride: 
I bless the day that Rhoda rode a roadster ! 

and we applauded, and gave him twopence. 
We went to the theatre thrice in the fort- 
night (twice a year is all we can endure 
in London) and had the vitality to survive 
the artificial dulness of The Lady Slavey, 
and the academic morals of Liberty Hall 
and The Idler. At night the moon laid 
out along the sea a rouleau of silver discs ; 
the Calais Phare twinkled intermittently, a 
yellow lantern, and Cape Gray Nose burst 
in anapestic flame — two white, one red — 
across the Channel, visible from the Bell 
Harry Tower in Canterbury, sixteen miles 
inland. On the evening of Dover Regatta, 



190 THE MAN FORBID 

a magician from London with magnesium 
and pyrotechnic sorcery fanned the pale 
cliffs into a red passion of flame and rolling 
smoke ; the castle shone white ; catherine- 
wheels whirled agonised; rockets scaled the 
heavens in vain ; the archways in the cliff- 
face glowed like the gates of hell ; and the 
youthful Tamerlanes and Mahomets gazed 
awestruck from the pier-head on Satan's 
invisible world displayed. In the daytime 
we visited all the Cinque Ports : Hastings, 
with its grey castle and gay crowd ; Win- 
chelsea, sad and sweet, haunted and haunt- 
ing, to which the sea was twice a traitor — 
by inundation, and then, in cruellest irony, 
by desertion ; Rye, pleasant, compact on 
hilly streets — an old church with gilded ' 
quarter-boys, and, through an old gate, 
masts and the misty sea ; the two Romneys, 
silent, deserted in that strange new land 
where the grey rails glisten across beds and 
bars of shingle, and shining meres spread 
among loops of flat green land; Hythe, 
with its treasure of hacked skulls — Briton, 



tete-a-t£te 191 

Saxon, Roman, Dane, gathered from a 
long-forgotten battlefield; and Sandwich, 
oldest, greyest, quaintest of English towns, 
looking mournfully from three high 
churches at the distant treacherous sea. 
And on Sundays I went to Calais to be 
shaved. 

B.L, To Calais? 

I. I. That is an operation I could never 
achieve without hacking m^r face; and as 
the barbers are all closed in Dover on Sun- 
days and I had omitted to tryst one, we 
went to Calais. Return tickets, fifteen 
shillings ; luncheons, six shillings ; Figaro, 
half a franc — twenty-one and sixpence for 
a shave. You see, we were on a holiday. 

B. L. You have described to me an 
actual, unconventional, and high-spirited 
holiday. I should have enjoyed it myself. 



CHANCTONBURY RING 



Extracts from the following essays have 
appeared heretofore in an English volume 
but they are published now for the first time 
in their entirety. 



CHANCTONBURY RING 

STEYNING, an ancient town of a reti- 
cent aspect, most picturesque, but fin- 
ished, full of variety and engaging detail, 
stands on the highway to Horsham where 
the road rises to a spur of the Downs. It 
is a place of gables, oaken beams, shingle 
roofs, mature-looking wooden houses, a 
place of stepped pavements and of old gar- 
dens. The railway approached it, but kept 
its distance. Nothing has soiled it ; it be- 
longs to a prior century. One would be 
glad to see it once a week on an afternoon 
of mellow sunshine ; then its warmth, its old 
homeliness, the sense of room about it, and 
of the easiness of life, deliver the thought 
and refresh the fancy like a well-dreamed 
sleep. Its air of mystery is never wanting 
either. Deep doorways, overhanging eaves, 

195 



193 THE MAN FORBID 

beams strained and bent, narrow entries, 
windows low and broad, or high and secret, 
are loaded with meaning. Towns and 
houses are your only ghosts. Finger on 
lip, Steyning haunts the foot of Chancton- 
bury Ring, a picturesque phantom of the 
old order, a stationary ghost likely to tarry 
long since the nineteenth century itself has 
failed to lay it. 

Out of Steyning the by-way to Chanc- 
tonbury Ring runs for a short mile through 
a narrow valley, and then ascends the flank 
of the Downs. In the close silence of the 
steep-banked way, sounds drifted or swung 
at anchor : the carnival music of the thrush ; 
the starling's castanets ; the muted cymbals 
and triangles of some stubborn hammering 
bird. On either hand leafless elms rose 
from the crest of the slope, and bonfires of 
dark green boxwood, whose new leaves 
flamed like greenish gold, studded the op- 
posing acclivities. Ground-ivy, darker even 
than the boxwood, whose new leaves flamed 
like greenish gold, festooned the way ; night 



CHANCTONBURY RING 197 

and the sea were mixed in the hue of this 
ivy, and its white veins ghmmered hke pen- 
cilhngs of foam. DandeHons, broad and 
thick-rayed, as richly petalled as chrysan- 
themums, and of a golden hue unrivalled 
by any flower, shone out in clusters and con- 
stellations, stars of the first magnitude in 
a galaxy of cuckoo-buds amid a sky of 
violets. 

The wind was easterly, and its shrill pipe 
made itself heard as soon as the road left 
the valley and set itself against the Down. 
But here the northern slopes are fledged 
with beech, and the hills looked comely 
even in the bleak weather of this wintry 
April. Violets and hyacinths diapered with 
purple the russet beech-mast, though the 
cowslips hoarded their gold in their pale 
green chalices. The white-starred branches 
of the blackthorn sprinkled the prevailing 
bronze and purple of the covert with sparse 
sprays of silver; and the emerald banners 
of the downy, crisp, and pleated beech- 
leaves claimed the time for middle-spring. 



198 THE MAN FORBID 

in spite of the attempted piracy of winter. 
In a bight of the land, the white, chalky 
plain, shaded with the sprouting down of 
the young corn, showed where the tide of 
harvest will run far up, and break against 
the swelling hill. 

When the crest of the Downs was 
reached, Chanctonbury Ring was still a 
mile away ; from the long easy slope of the 
ridge, the back-bone of the world in that 
neighbourhood, Sussex stretched out on the 
one hand, and Sussex and the sea on the 
other — great and varied prospects, but 
constant quantities for a mile: an inter- 
locutor became at once desirable. That is 
the secret of the proficient, the truly pere- 
grinate wayfarer. Given a winding road 
with constant surprises, a straight, confined 
road leading to the unknown, or a steep 
ascent that taxes the breath, then the way- 
farer is naturally occupied in observing, 
in expecting, or in enduring; but when he 
reaches some agreeable and unexacting 
path, with the goal in sight, and wide. 



CHANCTONBURY RING 199 

detached, far-reaching views on either 
hand, he must let his mind go. Should he 
compel it in the strict way of observation 
he errs lamentably, and will find the land- 
scape unsatisfying ; he must think of some- 
thing else. Best of all would be an actual 
companion : on the lonely top of the Downs 
constant recourse must be had to imaginary 
people, disputatious or otherwise, who sur- 
prise one by starting subjects thought to 
be at rest, by talking of men and things 
one had laid on the shelf. The Imaginary 
Disputant began about Ibsen and the per- 
sonality of dramatists. 

" In my opinion," said the Disputant, 
" no writer reveals himself more fully than 
the dramatist. It is inevitable. The mo- 
ment you begin to consider the springs of 
action and the motives of conduct, there 
is one subject always at hand from infancy 
to death. Unconsciously, perhaps, at first 
your intimate acquaintance with this sub- 
ject appears in your work ; then, if you are 
not a mere botcher and charlatan, sooner or 



200 THE MAN FORBID 

later the true source of man's knowledge of 
human nature is revealed to you. It is a 
terrible revelation ; but you cannot, you 
dare not, ignore it. You try to, doubtless ; 
you even think you succeed in doing so ; 
but your own accent and semblance are 
heard and seen in the vilest wretches, the 
grossest fools, as well as in the sweetest 
natures and the most heroic characters 
wherewith you mask the good and evil in 
yourself." 

" But can a dramatist not portray at all, 
then, another than himself? Dramatists 
have drawn women successfully, for ex- 
ample." 

" Yes, but think of the women. Wher- 
ever there is vital power at work the dram- 
atist's people are of one mould and order. 
Compare Ibsen's women with Shakespeare's. 
However widely each author's women may 
differ among themselves, Cleopatra and 
Imogen are hardly distinguishable from 
each other when you contrast them with 
Hiordis and Asta Allmers. This sub-con- 



CHANCTONBURY RING 201 

sciousness, what is basic in the dramatist, 
appears in all his creations." 

" Well, of course, it must do so ; when 
you come to think of it, it cannot be other- 
wise." 

" Yes, but the literary world generally 
seems loath to acknowledge it. Fear lurks 
behind the loathing, I think. Byron is the 
type of the protesting author, terrified at 
the self -betrayal in his works." 

" About Ibsen, however. He has be- 
trayed himself — he, the strongest, most 
self-contained of all poets and dramatists ? " 

" Strong, but not self-contained — any- 
thing but self-contained. His plays smoke 
with his personality. That is the very note 
of the man: that is his originality. The 
characters in the best-known of Ibsen's 
plays, his later ones, professional, middle 
class, and lower-middle class people, are as 
dull and uninteresting as they can be ; and 
yet he has peopled the imagination of the 
Europe of his time with these undistin- 
guished beings, because they are all Ibsen. 



202 THE MAN FORBID 

They were metal of no mark or value: 
Ibsen alloys them with his personality, 
stamps them with his image and super- 
scription, and they become current 
throughout the world. A mistaken real- 
ism seems to advise the drawing of men 
exactly as they are. If it could be done, 
you would have at last something worthy 
to be called a caput mortuum; but it is an 
impossibility. You could no more take 
crude man and place him in a novel or a 
play — 'that is, make him literature, than 
you could make a lump of iron ore into a 
carving-knife by laying it on the table 
along with a fork and steel. Humanity is 
the raw material of literature ; the smelt- 
ing, the fining, the casting, the shaping, 
the damascening are the work of the crea- 
tive artist, whose indispensable medium is 
his own personality." 

" Well, then, how would you describe the 
personality of Ibsen ? " 

" Ah ! I am too near him — and here 
we are at the top of the hill." 



CHANCTONBURY RING 203 

In the British-Roman work on the sum- 
mit of Chanctonbury a plantation grows 
now. A woodman with measured stroke 
drove wedges into the bole of a tree, and 
his boys played beside him. A crescent- 
shaped coppice of beech uncut for years 
girdled the hill. In the sheltered hollows 
beeches clustered ; beech groves clad all the 
northern slopes. The leaf-buds of the 
beech, small spear-heads of bronze, washed 
the downs with a dark ruddy hue like the 
dull glow of a furnace door. The haze on 
the horizon beat and flickered, a heavy eye- 
lid drooping over the sky. White gables 
stood out on the plain, apparitions among 
the dark, budding woods. Red roofs, the 
smoke of houses, cream-white ribbons of 
road, touched the green and purple ground 
with points of colour and light. Seaward 
the furze scattered gold over the rolling 
land down to the shingly beach ; and the 
pearl-grey sea under a sky of hammered 
iron shone with an inward lustre treasured 
in its deeps and garnered from many a 



20^ THE MAN FORBID 

shining summer. The east wind sighed 
and wailed, but through its forlorn note 
there sounded a sheep bell from the fold 
and a cuckoo's mellow chime. 



BY-WAYS 



BY-WAYS 

THE road was from the sea Inland, and 
then, for a mile, parallel with the 
shore, skirting the verge of the cliffless 
Downs. The wind, from the south-east, 
sharp and vapoury, carried brine and haze 
over the southern counties ; but its trans- 
parent burden was barely visible in the 
strong sunshine ; a pallor, as of the thinnest 
coating of varnish, overspread the faint 
blue sky. The sun, an hour past noon, 
showed small and round, shorn of its beams 
by the dim haze ; hot and glittering, all the 
same,* like an eye-hole opening into a vat 
of molten silver. Upon the horizon the 
vapour began to build itself up in tiers and 
courses ; but the rest of the firmament was 
clear, save for the thin veil of mist and one 
solitary plume of white cloud that streamed 

207 



208 THE MAN FORBID 

from the top of heaven. A wooded park, 
like a broad hem, edged the sunken Downs. 
Groves, avenues, and single trees resounded 
with the business of the rookery. The in- 
cessant, harsh, sibilant-raucous noise, rising 
and falling in gusts and squalls, swept the 
park from end to end. Sometimes a plan- 
gent voice soared out of the ground-tone 
in wild protest against the universe or a 
thieving neighbour; now a cloud of rooks 
would rise and adjourn from their tree- 
tops to a select space in the air, and there 
gyrate and discuss a knotty point with the 
unparliamentary liberty the problem re- 
quired; or the low, deep-toned, self-satis- 
fied caw of experienced and well-to-do 
rooks, who had settled themselves for the 
season weeks ago, would become distinctly 
audible in some Jull of the stormy outcry, 
some reprieve of that friction which the 
clan-economy of a rookery entails. 

After the park was passed, the low naked 
Downs rose and dipped like sluggish waves, 
like stagnant waves enchanted and sus- 



BY-WAYS 209 

pended there in ungainly and painful pos- 
tures. Indeed, there is nothing in land- 
scape more unsatisfactory to the aesthetic 
sense, more uncomfortable to the mood of 
the spectator, than the seaward slope of 
the Downs. Where a bold escarpment 
fronts the Channel the unnatural condi- 
tion of these bereft hills is not perhaps so 
forcible in its pathetic appeal ; but even 
then the nakedness of the land distresses. 
These low, rolling hills should be covered 
with forest, as they were originally. It is 
nature's plan. The mid-Surrey hills, or 
the Chilterns between Wendover and 
Prince's Risborough, in conformation and 
distribution the very images of the South 
Downs, are perfect in the richness, the se- 
crecy and repose of their wooded, their 
heavily draped contours. But this unfor- 
tunate range by the sea is doomed to thrust 
out along the shore its naked slopes and 
mounds like the limbs and shoulders of 
plucked fowls. The expense of a luxury 
is not calculable in currency alone ; the 



210 THE MAN FORBID 

beauty of the South Downs is the prime 
cost of Southdown mutton. 

But the furze blooms even here. Most 
incongruous it seems, a bracelet of gold 
and emerald high up on a brawny arm, all 
muscle and goose-flesh. One has to be 
fanciful to keep these Downs in coun- 
tenance. The ploughed land, however, 
puts no strain on the imagination. Labour 
has redeemed it. Nothing is more beauti- 
ful than a ploughed field; and here, where 
the alloy of clay and chalk shines in the 
silver-gilt and deeply chased furrows of the 
broad fields, there seems to pass over the 
face of the earth a smiling promise of the 
golden harvest asleep in its bosom. Yet 
these splendid fields, like many other 
passages, must be separated from their con- 
text before their beauty and prophecy be- 
come apparent. In their place upon the 
shivering Downs, when the sun is veiled and 
the south-east comes with a fierce sting, 
they might easily be mistaken for pieces of 
sacking, old corn-bags, hung on the flanks 



BY-WAYS 211 

of the exposed land in lieu of a blanket. 

The song of the lark has taken entire 
possession of the air. Like a heaven-high 
vine it garlands the whole firmament. In 
the rookery or here, again, passing a row 
of sheepf olds where the hillside is plaintive 
w^ith the bleating of lambs, the larks are 
inaudible ; but when these undergrowths, 
jungles, and mere wildernesses of sound are 
past, the hanging gardens of the larks ab- 
sorb the senses. From dawn till dusk, and 
from the middle-spring through the full 
blaze of summer to the smouldering golden 
moons of autumn, these garlands of sound, 
leaf and flower and fruit, fresco and fan- 
tasy and arabesque, will wreathe and over- 
run the shining air. 

A raw path leading northward, with an 
unbarbered hedge on one side and forlorn 
market-gardens on the other — a path that 
seemed bound to end in a slough of 
despond, pulled itself together suddenly, 
and with a certain air of knowing its busi- 
ness well enough, stepped into Portslade, 



212 THE MAN FORBID 

a village in a cup. This is the inland 
Portslade, a mile above the railway one 
known to the South Coast traveller. On 
one lip of the cup, a short Early English, 
ivy-covered tower of St. Nicholas balances 
itself sturdily ; and the yellow lichen that 
lacquers the shingle-roof makes it a glory 
and a wonder — like the roof of heaven 
" inlaid with patines of bright gold." 
Here, indeed, a green-gold lichen gilds 
every rough surface that the sea-wind can 
reach. Stems, branches, twigs of trees, 
railings that have been long without a fresh 
coat of paint, the plaster of the walls and 
of the houses, are all enamelled with the hue 
of chrysoprase. 

A back way led to the northern brow of 
the hill, where a ghostly windmill overlooks 
Hangleton. Hangleton Place, a Tudor 
manor ensconced in the valley, is now a 
poultry-farm ; and in Hangleton church- 
yard is buried Dr. Kenealy. The tomb- 
stone, erected by public subscription, as 
one had forgotten, is a table of grey gran- 



BY-WAYS 213 

ite with florid mosaics in red and blue ; a 
cross on the top, and a four-square band 
of shamrocks and roses, with dates of 
birth and death about it ; also this text, 
" Thou shalt be recompensed at the resur- 
rection of the just." Curiously enough, 
on the morning of the day the Itinerant 
stumbled on Dr. Kenealy's tomb the very 
remarkable impostor whose notoriety the 
doctor had shared ended his career in a 
poor lodging off the Edgware road. More 
years ago than the Itinerant cares to re- 
member a boy engaged in weighing por- 
tions of 16.6 grammes of beet for precipi- 
tation with acetate of lead in the 
polariscopic analysis of sugar, saw through 
the glass of the chemical balance in the 
Public Analyst's Laboratory in Cathcart 
Street, Greenock, a vast moon face at a 
window in an upper storey of the Tontine 
Hotel opposite. Three quarters of the 
face were visible — for more than an hour, 
dull, motionless. No one seemed to come 
into the room. Did " the Claimant " sit 



214 THE MAN FORBID 

there to be seen of men? He was to lec- 
ture in the Town Hall that night. Per- 
haps he was recapitulating his speech. At 
any rate, he sat there for more than an 
hour, expressionless and motionless. He 
did not appear to watch the bustle in the 
street; he did not smoke; he did not drum 
on anything with his fingers. He simply 
sat still. To exist and digest was enough 
for this man apparently. In all likeli- 
hood he never experienced a truly unhappy 
moment. He was only an automaton 
cunningly fitted with digestion and mem- 
ory. If conscience be deleted, life is much 
simplified, three-quarters of it, conduct 
namely, becoming a blank. The deletion, 
or at any rate the subordination, of con- 
science is well known to be a main factor 
in many a reputation ; and Arthur Orton 
had certainly obtained the upper hand of 
his. Ask the clearest conscience in the 
world to sit for an hour motionless, with 
no one in the room, and nothing to do ! 
It is not conscience that performs feats of 



BY-WAYS 215 

that kind ; they are the achievements of 
genius, or of beings whose monstrous de- 
fects seem to be equivalent to the posses- 
sion of genius. 

The square tower of Shoreham Church, 
a landmark for miles, stood out on the 
way back, and in front of it the sea, imme- 
diately under the sun, shone with pale gold ; 
but the rest of the Channel was dark and 
narrow, for the haze had thrust its broad 
bastion close in to the land. The haze, 
indeed, had become the main feature in 
that part of the world. Built up on the 
horizon, a magical foundation, the grey 
vapour, like a fragile urn, enclosed the 
spaces of the air. At the round mouth of 
the urn, high up, the sky appeared, a pale 
blue disc against which the song of the 
larks beat in vain, echoing back in showers 
of golden notes. 



PROSE ECLOGUE 



PROSE ECLOGUE 

Basil, MenzieSy Brian. 

BRIAN, Have you ever written short 
stories, Basil? 

Basil, Never ; nor can I read them. 

Brian. I rather hke them. 

Basil. Then your palate's gone — I 
mean your mental palate. I still prefer a 
sandwich : bread — meat — mustard. The 
short story is mere mustard, the scanty 
dish which Grumio, that " false, deluding 
slave," jeered Katharina with. 

Brian. Your short-story men are your 
only pickle-merchants. 

Basil. Occasionally they are good men 
gone wrong; oftenest they are single- 
prong men. 

Menzies. Single-prong? 

Basil, Yes. Some men are tridents, 
21Q 



220 THE MAN FORBID 

some are dinner-forks, some are pitch- 
forks, and some have but one prong. Of 
these last are the short-story men, the 
" strong men " of fiction. They remind 
me of the Parisian chiffonnier, who gathers 
from frequented places with his pointed 
stick odds and ends of paper and rags. 
They are an insufferable nuisance; their 
pens are always ready furbished; if you 
so much as hint an idea, an experience, an 
episode, they stab it up at once and thrust 
it into their wallets among an omnium 
gatherum of other half -ideas, experiences, 
and episodes, where it lies till it is " high," 
and is then brought forth as " strong 
meat." 

Brian. And who are the dinner forks.? 

Basil. Average men, I suppose. 

Brian. And the pitch-forks? 

Basil. Why, you are pretty like one, 
pursuing relentlessly a passing remark. 

Brian. And the tridents? Come, the 
tridents ? 

Basil. My friends and I. 



PROSE ECLOGUE 221 

Menzies. Good. Did you know that I 
had written short stories? 

Brian, No ! Tell us all about it. 

Basil. What is there to tell except that 
for every story he wrote there is a grey 
hair on his soul.^ 

Menzies, That is true. But I would 
confess ; I have never told it to anyone, 
the stories having been anonymous. The 
first one was of a woman I knew; a tall 
fair Scotchwoman, with a perfect oval 
face and large pale eyes. In her twenty- 
fourth year she married a painter and set 
herself to destroy his temperament. I 
met her in her father's house shortly after 
she had spoiled her husband, body and soul ; 
and she told me the story herself. " He 
kept talking to me," she said, " of tem- 
perament, temperament, temperament. 
What is temperament? Do you know? 
Does anyone know? I have no tempera- 
ment ; but I suppose he had, for he was 
different from me. He liked all kinds of 
stupidity and foolishness — little children. 



222 THE MAN FORBID 

religious people, romance, and sentiment. 
After the honeymoon, when he went back 
to his easel, he nearly swooned at the sight 
of it ; for I had determined to see of what 
stuff his temperament was made, and had 
painted a leer on the faces of his figures. 
He tore up the canvas and began anew. 
As soon as he had a face drawn, at night 
I put a leer into the eyes or a wicked 
smile on the lips. He went to his easel 
every morning shaking with terror. I had 
now fully made up my mind that he should 
get rid of his temperament and become as 
strong as I, for I rather liked him ; he 
was very handsome. So I persevered with 
his faces, and was amazed at his persist- 
ence. At last one morning he asked me to 
stay beside him while he painted. He 
drew and coloured the heads of three 
cherubs with extraordinary rapidity and 
force, the practice which my device had 
secured him having increased his skill im- 
mensely. The faces were sweet and beauti- 
ful; and he asked me if they were not so. 



PROSE ECLOGUE 223 

I said I rather liked them, but that I saw 
nothing particularly sweet about them: 
charming little imps, I called them. 
' Then I am a lost man,' he cried. ' Some- 
thing terrible has gone wrong with me. 
Day after day I paint what I think beauti- 
ful faces ; these that I have just done seem 
to me adorable. You see them as they 
are, leering and malicious ; and to-morrow 
I too shall see them as they are. Some 
subtle paralysis has attacked me.' Next 
morning, as usual, he found his faces impu- 
dent or malignant. I comforted him, and 
told him to struggle no more against his 
own nature, but to follow this inferior bent 
which proclaimed itself in spite of him. 
' I will,' he said. ' It may work itself out.' 
Then an evil spirit took actual possession 
of him, and he painted loathsome and hor- 
rible things. He was a weak man ; his 
temperament had only been degraded, not 
yet destroyed. One night I changed his 
diabolic into angelic faces ; and in the 
morning he came to me weeping tears of 



224 THE MAN FORBID 

joy. * I have worked it out,' he cried. 
' I am free of it. Yesterday, while I de- 
signed what I thought the most wicked 
group of countenances ever imagined, I 
was painting divinities. Come and see 
them.' I excused myself till the after- 
noon ; and he, happy and jubilant, went 
out to walk off his excitement. In his 
absence I changed his divinities into idiots 
and maniacs. When at length he led me 
to his studio he had no eyes for anything 
but me. I felt him watching me as I 
stood in front of his picture. I looked at 
it, and then with cold surprise at his glad, 
eager face. The blood left his cheeks like 
a lamp that's blown out; he glanced at 
his picture, and fell in a tremor on the 
floor. I helped him to a seat, placed my- 
self opposite him, and told him how I had 
manipulated his canvases in the hope of 
enabling him to master his temperament. 
When he realised what I said, he slid from 
his chair glaring at me as if I had been 
a wild beast about to devour him. I moved 



PROSE ECLOGUE 225 

to help him again, but he shrank from me, 
shrieking, ' Keep off ! ' He crept back- 
wards on his hands and knees, growhng 
and glaring at me hideously. He reached 
the door and kicked at it as a beast might, 
flinging out his legs. He has never stood 
erect since ; he lives in a stall and eats out 
of a manger; the asylum doctor says he 
cannot recover. What is temperament? 
Have I destroyed his, or is it now rampant? 
How weak he was ! Is temperament what 
people used to mean by soul? " What do 
you think of that? 

Brian. It's very strong. 

Basil. Very fair mustard. 

Menzies. Right! It's just mustard, 
and not really strong; no bread, no meat, 
merely condiment. In the famous old 
image, it is a convulsion ; sometimes six 
men can't hold a feeble epileptic. But I 
got to like fits, especially as I found that 
I possessed the knack of taking them; so 
I had a series in various periodicals ; and 
got good money too : people are always 



226 THE MAN FORBID 

generous to a man in a fit. Gradually, 
however, it became more difficult to fall 
into them ; I had to work myself up — 
with stimulants. At last nothing would 
cause them ; and I took to feigning them 
— picking up episodes like the chiffonnier 
in your image, instead of creating: in my 
own image, chewing soap in order to foam 
at the mouth like the impostor in the 
street: and nobody but myself knew the 
difference. 

Brian. But you don't apply this gen- 
erally.^ There are plenty of good short, 
strong stories by good strong men. 

Basil. Good condiment. 
■ Menzies. Good convulsions : most inter- 
esting, attracting great crowds ; but only 
convulsions. 

Basil. Any one line of actual poetry 
is worth a million short stories. 

Menzies. Here's one. " Up rose the 
sun, and up rose Emily." 

Brian. Yes ; but they are geniuses — 



PROSE ECLOGUE 227 

great men, some of those short-story 
writers. 

Menzies, My dear Brian, we are all 
geniuses nowadays. 

Basil. Admirable ! All men are gen- 
iuses : it is only a difference of degree. 



ON INTERVIEWING 



ON INTERVIEWING 

PROSE ECLOGUE 

Basil — Sandy — Brian — Menzies, 

BRIAN, Did you ever interview any- 
body, Basil? 

Basil. Yes ; but I shall never do the 
like again. 

Brian, I suppose you felt very small. 

Basil. Yes. Not nearly so small, how- 
ever, as the man I interviewed; of that I 
am certain. 

Sandy. I suppose it is really a degrad- 
ing thing for both parties. 

Brian. Were you ever interviewed? 

Basil. No ; but once I was asked to be. 

Brian. And what did you reply ? 

Basil. Why, I said I was much obliged, 
but begged to decline, because I thought 

231 



232 THE MAN FORBID 

it a very illegitimate advertisement for the 
interviewee, and a most illegitimate way of 
turning a guinea for the " interwiever," as 
they used to spell it in France. He argued 
with me, and I explained what I meant. I 
told him that if he were interested in my 
great unread works and in my personality, 
the thing for him to do was to buy the 
works or read them in the British Museum, 
and then write his article ; that that would 
be a journeymanlike proceeding, creditable 
and reflecting credit. Interviewing, I said, 
was a most miraculous device whereby a 
man's brains were picked with his own con- 
sent. I told him that the very highest 
kind of man must perforce become a snob, 
however temporarily, the moment he sub- 
mitted to the question ; and that the " in- 
terwiever " in the exercise of his trade was 
on the same footing as a lacquey. I 
pointed out how injurious it was to pander 
to the idle curiosity of the public, and de- 
clared that if my books were not to be 
read for themselves, they should certainly 



ON INTERVIEWING 233 

not be read because of a mawkish interest 
in me. 

Brian. That's what Keats said; he 
would have no " maw^kish popularity." 

Sandy. Yes, but interviewing is some- 
times quite legitimate, I think. For ex- 
ample : if a man happens to be a great 
authority on a public question which has 
become critical, an interview might be the 
best way of publishing his opinion. 

Basil. That, of course. But we were 
talking of the personal interview, which is 
the interview par excellence. 

Brian. The only one, to all intents and 
purposes. Anything else is quite excep- 
tional. 

Menzies (with repressed passion). 
Mawkish, did you say.? You called it 
mawkish ? 

Basil. Hillo, Menzies, old chap! 
What's the matter with you.? 

Sandy. Menzies has been interviewed 
two or three times recently. 

Brian. The devil he has ! 



234 THE MAN FORBID 

Basil. It was Keats called it mawkish, 
Menzies — Keats. Pistols if you like ; but 
remember, it was Keats. 

Menzies. Where is the use of talking 
about Keats? There was no interviewing 
in his time; besides, he was only a child 
when he died. His remarks on conduct are 
not of the least consequence. 

Sandy. Oh, come ! 

Menzies. I mean what I say. Keats 
was a great man, and would have been, had 
he lived, a consummate artist in living as 
well as a consummate artist in poetry. But 
as far as life went, he was only in the 
nursery when he died. The school of life 
is marriage and paternity. 

Basil. Yes; well .f^ 

Menzies. Well, it is this word mawkish 
I want to get at. What's the meaning of 
it? I see it dealt about in reviews pretty 
liberally. The meaning of mawkish? De- 
fine — define ! 

Basil. It meant loathsome, maggotty, 
making the gorge rise; but it has lost its 



ON INTERVIEWING 235 

stronger meaning. You never see it ap- 
plied to Zola. Now it is used of affected 
sentiment, of gush, of unctuous morality, 
of artistic cant, of religiosity, of general 
flabbiness. 

Menzies. Then the world is full of 
mawkishness. 

Basil. Chockfull. 

Menzies. In that case I cannot help 
being mawkish on occasion ; for I myself 
am and have nothing ; moods drive through 
me; individual moods, and the world's 
moods. 

Basil. Nonsense, Menzies ! You're not 
going to make yourself a " terrible exam- 
ple " of everything, are you.^^ 

Menzies. What if I have no choice? 

Basil. Oh, and that was why you sub- 
mitted to the " interwiever " ! How many 
times were you interviewed? 

Menzies. Four times. 

Basil. And about what? 

Menzies. Myself. 

Basil. Well, in the most dispassionate 



236 THE MAN FORBID 

t 

way and speaking with the authority of one 
in an advanced form in the school of hfe, 
I say that it was mawkish. 

Menzies. I was annoyed at the word at 
first, but I am quite wilhng to admit that 
it was mawkish. 

Basil. And glory in it ! 

Menzies. No ; I don't glory in any- 
thing. All that I contend is that I am 
quite willing to be called mawkish along 
with the majority of mankind, my meaning 
being, of course, that there is no such thing 
as mawkishness ; that to have fits of senti- 
mentality, to gush, to sermonise, to talk 
cant about art, to be pharisaical, to be 
interviewed — is to be human. You never 
can understand a thing by sneering at it. 
I would abolish all such words as mawkish, 
maudlin, snob, cad, cant ; they are despite- 
ful, intolerant words. See here. In 
Bacon's time Philosophy included Science; 
now Science includes Philosophy. Litera- 
ture has hitherto stood apart, embracing 
when it chose, in a more or less cavalier 



ON INTERVIEWING 237 

manner, both Philosophy and Science ; but 
in our time Science is going to embrace, 
has already flung its arm about. Litera- 
ture, and — 

Sandy. Oh, oh ! 

Menzies. But it is not a question of 
whether one likes it or not. The thing is 
happening before our eyes. Both the 
method and the result^ of science have 
been applied to fiction by Zola, to the 
drama by Ibsen : these two are the most 
powerful literary influences of our time — 
like them or not*; that is so — and what 
they have started must go on — 

Sandy. But romance .^^ 

Menzies. Romance must just " fettle 
its fine joints " to the yoke of science, or 
betake itself to a nunnery ; and my point is 
that, as science knows neither intolerance 
nor despite, the words mawkish, maudlin, 
snob, cant, cad, etc., are unscientific, and 
therefore meaningless and illiterate. 

Basil. But what has all this got to do 
with interviewing .f^ 



238 THE MAN FORBID 

Menz'ies. Everything. In literature we 
have had Creators and Spectators ; now we 
are having Experiencers. All our work is 
becoming more and more consciously auto- 
biographic ; and we must invite experience, 
we must offer ourselves to the vivisection of 
circumstance. Remember, I am saying 
nothing as to whether this is a temporary 
disaster for literature or not. But that it 
is being done, and that it will be done uni- 
versally, I am certain ; and I am equally 
certain that in the end it must make im- 
mensely for beauty, and that faculty in 
beauty called righteousness. The Experi- 
encer is here: I see him and her at every 
turning — I shan't mention names, but 
there they are — many minds, but all of 
one mood to see the thing that is, to shirk 
nothing, to have done with trappings, to 
lay bare, to encounter, to say, as well as 
be, what we are — not what we might imag- 
ine ourselves, not even what we would like 
to be. And this is a great mood, I think ; 
the mood in which men and women wish to 



ON INTERVIEWING 239 

be and to be known as they are, to respect 
and to be respected, to love and to be loved 
simply for what they are : the very greatest 
mood since the time of Shakespeare, when 
men saw themselves as demigods. 

Basil. It is very interesting, Menzies, 
and I believe I see your meaning. But 
about this interviewing. 

Menzies. Well, I was simply submitting 
to an experiment ; and although my inter- 
viewers — three gentlemen and a lady — 
were most accomplished and agreeable peo- 
ple, I own I didn't like it. 

Basil. What did you not like about it? 

Menzies. I was just very uncomforta- 
ble ; and there was that most horrible of all 
feelings — a desire to say more than was 
necessary, such as Topsy yielded to when 
" 'f essing " to Miss Ophelia. 

Sandy. But you didn't yield to it. 

Menzies. Oh, I said things I shouldn't 
have said, and left unsaid things I should, 
both in matters of fact and opinion. 
There you are : you are asked a question. 



240 » THE MAN FORBID 

and you give an answer more or less 
thoughtlessly, sometimes appearing to be 
interested in matters to which you are quite 
indifferent. 

Sandy. But you see a proof, don't 
you? 

Menzies. Oh, yes ; and I made some 
changes, but not many, and none of them 
essential, because I did not wish to appear 
other than I was. A mistake, I see clearly 
now. My mind works so slowly that I 
had to be interviewed four times before I 
found the real meaning of the personal 
interview. 

Basil. And what is that.^^ 

Menzies. Instead of giving plain an- 
swers to plain questions, I should have been 
prepared with an ideal autobiography 
couched in telling phrases, and so have 
established a legend — a splendid back- 
ground for myself. 

Basil. That would have been very sci- 
entific ! 

Sandy. I guess Menzies is ironical. 



ON INTERVIEWING 241 

But I don't agree with Basil about the 
ethic of the interview. The interview is 
here; you may develop it or degrade it, 
but you cannot destroy it. 

Menzies. Right. The interview existed 
in embryo in the first movable type. In- 
deed, any publication is an interview ; and 
its direct employment to-day is inevitable. 
There is no limit to its indirect employ- 
ment. The congregation has an interview 
with the preacher, and the interview, called 
a sermon, is published for the world to 
read; the lecturer, the platform speaker, 
is interviewed by his audience ; and what 
are the speeches in the Houses of Parlia- 
ment but the nation interviewing the 
powers that be? We have already Gov- 
ernment by Interview. 

Sandy. Bravo ! And it seems to me 
that out of the personal interview some- 
thing of real importance may be evolved. 
The want of mutual charity between men 
and women, trades and professions, cliques 
and coteries, classes and masses, between 



242 THE MAN FORBID 

peoples and continents, is, of course, the 
result of mutual misunderstanding. How 
could this gulf of enmity be bridged over 
better than by people in all ranks of so- 
ciety, and in all the ends of the earth, 
opening frankly their minds and hearts to 
each other in daily interviews in every 
newspaper? 

Brian. By Jove! Reform the world 
by interviewing! 

Basil. I like this better now. That is 
what Menzies was driving at a little while 
ago. Literature, even newspaper litera- 
ture, must become consciously autobio- 
graphic. We can never go back on Rous- 
seau's " Confessions," Goethe's " Fact and 
Fancy," Carlyle's " Reminiscences." We 
must — How did Menzies put it? 

Sandy. I remember. We must be, and 
be known, just as we are; respect and be 
respected, love and be loved, for what we 
are. 

Basil. Yes. The world has been stand- 
ing on too great ceremony with itself; it 



ON INTERVIEWING 243 

must now take itself into its own confi- 
dence. 

Menzies. Good. That is the only way 
in which we can come within hail of the 
time, long-preached, long-prayed-for, and 
so long of coming, 

" When man to man the world o*er 
Shall brithers be for a' that." 



ON THE DOWNS 



ON THE DOWNS 

IT was time to walk about the world 
again. That which happens to most 
men and horses, at least once in their lives, 
most frequently at the end, had happened 
to the Itinerant ; circumstances had obliged 
him to stumble on between the shafts long 
after he should have been turned out to 
grass. Standing in his cab-rank one day, 
very limp and doleful, he said to himself, 
" I've had enough of this ; I'll give my 
last kick and die on the spot." So he 
flung out with all the vigour at his com- 
mand; but instead of kicking his last and 
dropping down dead, he only threw over 
the traces, and smashed his match-box of 
a hansom. Finding himself at liberty, he 
promptly set off down the street, and was 
out of sight before the drowsy cabmen, 
lounging against the railings of the church, 

247 



248 THE MAN FORBID 

grasped the fact that he had left his situ- 
ation. Fear of capture made the running, 
and he soon reached the Downs. 

Leaving the more hteral simihtude of a 
cab-horse, and retaining the spirit of it, 
the Itinerant did not at once, nor, indeed, 
for a considerable time, betake himself to 
grass with the assiduity becoming a true 
Nebuchadnezzar. When a Scotsman finds 
himself at cross purposes with life, what 
course does he follow.? He may say to 
himself, as the Itinerant did, " I will go 
and walk about the Downs." Or he may 
say, " I will write a great poem " ; or " I 
will go and preach in Hyde Park." He 
may say this, and he may say that, but he 
invariably does one of two things. He 
either sits down and drinks deeply, 
thoughtfully, systematically, of the amber 
spirit of his country, or he reads phi- 
losophy. The Itinerant read philosophy. 
Doubtless, philosophers never read philoso- 
phy : they have no necessity to do so. The 
universe is as clear to them as a crystal 



ON THE DOWNS 249 

ball, or a soap-bubble, or a whinstone — 
each according to his own theory. But to 
the ordinary layman and heavily-burdened 
wayfarer, above all to Scotsmen at cross 
purposes with life, philosophy is a sad 
temptation. To the very man in the street, 
indeed, it occasionally happens that the 
riddle of the universe grows vehement in 
its appeal ; and, however secretly and 
shamef astly, " the poor inhabitant below " 
examines again the interpretations that 
have been wrought out by others ; sets 
himself to answer the problem anew ; finally, 
burns his books, shaves, dines at a restau- 
rant, and returns to Piccadilly and the 
bosom of his family. 

The Itinerant, then, shut himself up with 
the Downs behind and the sea in front, 
and read many books that he had read 
before, and many that were new to him. 
Remembering that both Sterne and Brunei, 
the former at least preceptively, the latter 
by example, recommend horizontal repose 
as the surest eliminative of cerebration, he 



250 THE MAN FORBID 

lay on his back for days at a time, think- 
ing, or trying to think ; but that luxurious 
attitude seems to be reserved for the happy 
subhmation of humour and science : its ef- 
fect upon the Itinerant was only to pre- 
cipitate him more deeply in the turbid 
solution to which his reading and brooding 
had reduced all things. Not a moment 
too soon he shifted the venue ; climbed out 
of the metaphysical lye and reached the 
Downs at last. 

It was the end of January. There had 
been no winter ; but now it seemed about to 
begin. Although the wind was westerly, 
it blew harsh and cold, rasping over stub- 
ble and furrow. In a broad, almost level 
field on the lowest slope, an old plough- 
man stumbled behind his team: the horses 
were stiff and rusty ; the plough mouldy 
and out of date ; an urchin, small and 
elvish, the ploughman's grandson probably, 
held the bridle; the heavy clayey soil 
stuck so close and thick that the clumsy 
share had to be scraped with a hoe at either 



ON THE DOWNS 251 

furrow-end. A very ancient implement, 
and most unsteady ploughing ; the lines of 
the old peasant's laboured poem did not 
run smoothly on the sheet of earth he 
scored: but the sun and the rain and the 
seasons will make it all right; the golden 
crop in the autumn will rustle as richly 
over the shaky scrawl of the worn-out hand 
as over the polished lines of the steam- 
plough. 

In a belt of trees above the ill-ruled 
field a throstle sang a shrill prelude ; weeks 
ago he thought the spring had come, the 
season was so mild. His pipe will be mel- 
lower later on. Down in the churchyard, 
in the early summer, the passenger (the 
churchyard here is a thoroughfare for 
pedestrians) may catch a tapping sound 
among the gravestones — the mavis crack- 
ing snails with savage glee ! The snail is 
the mavis's oyster: and when he has lubri- 
cated his throat with a dozen or so, his 
notes become the purest and most spiritual 
to be heard in the grove. 



252 THE MAN FORBID 

Suddenly, the bells rang out from the 
church-tower. It was Saturday afternoon, 
and the ringers were practising. At the 
very first bob of the bells, a flight of star- 
lings in a high swart clump of twisted 
boughs, resenting the artificial sound, sweet 
as it seemed in the distance, or prompted 
by the well known professional jealousy of 
the passerine order to emulate music so 
space-filling and important, broke out into 
a frenzied chattering, surged madly into 
the air, and swooped down upon the gar- 
dens of the sea-coast town. The Norman 
tower from which the ringing came stood 
out a reddish brown against the grey-green 
sea. Not a sail was visible. Like an 
enormous shelf of glossy, oily, well-planed 
slate, the long, broad water sloped up 
against the sky. A slab of dingy opal, 
greasy, with a pale emerald flame, travel- 
ling over it transparently, the sea leant on 
the stony firmament as on a wall. Behind, 
the sinuous Downs, grey, green, and red — 
old land, budding crops, and fresh earth 



ON THE DOWNS 255 

— rocked and swayed with the motion of 
the world; and the Itinerant, falHng into 
a trance, had a vision which dehvered him 
from the spell of his own thought. 

He beheld a young man, like a demi- 
god, build up alone, but with the help of 
many obsequious genii, a noble palace of 
porphyry roofed with gold. In the pal- 
ace were many sumptuous suites of apart- 
ments which the demi-god, helped by his 
genii, furnished and adorned with all that 
was convenient and beautiful from the ends 
of the earth. In the palace also were lofty 
galleries dedicated to the various arts and 
sciences. When all was ready the demi- 
god married a beautiful goddess, who gra- 
ciously condescended to share his palace of 
porphyry and gold; and they filled their 
house with their friends — gods, demi- 
gods, heroes, and men and women. Joy- 
ful children were bom to them; and they 
spent their time happily in their family, in 
the enjoyment of friendship, in the study 
of all that might be known, and in the 



254, THE MAN FORBID 

pleasures of the arts. But the builder of 
the palace was dissatisfied. In a chamber 
at the top of his highest tower he brooded 
on the mystery of the universe. " What ? " 
he said ; and " Why ? " He wrote many 
volumes answering these questions ; but al- 
ways at the end of each volume he found 
the questions starting up again. At last, 
when he was old, one night in his lonely 
chamber an invisible power seized him, led 
him through all his galleries, and through 
the offices of his palace, out by a little 
postern, where at his feet lay a deep pit, 
which he knew was dug for him. Before 
he stretched himself in it, all his thought 
and speculation rushed through his mind 
once more, and yearning to say some word 
that should be an answer to the question of 
the world, he cried aloud, lifting his face 
to heaven for the last time, " Live to Die ! " 
At the very moment of his utterance and 
upward glance, there issued from an oppo- 
site postern, leading out of another palace 
of porphyry and gold which had been built 



ON THE DOWNS 255 

there at the same time as his own, an aged 
figure in every respect like himself. But 
the second demi-god, hearing the cry 
" Live to Die ! " raised his voice, and, with 
a wrathful gesture, replied, as they fell 
into the pit together, " Die to Live i " 



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